Which patient gets the ventilator? Doctors may have tough choices ahead
But in coming weeks, if COVID-19 continues to surge, such decisions will be inevitable.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has not said how many ventilators he thinks California will ultimately require, but studies in China found that between 2% and 6% of people with COVID-19 needed to be on ventilators. Colwell, the San Francisco doctor, said he is already considering what to do in such a situation. The city’s hospitals have about 750 ventilators and officials are trying to obtain others from reserve supplies, he said.
“One particular physician does not have the bird’s eye view of what is out there,” she said, adding that as a doctor caring for a patient, “you are probably not the best to make that decision because you always advocate for the patient.”With COVID-19, it remains unclear how often that is the case. One smallpublished in the medical journal the Lancet found that of 37 patients in Wuhan who were ventilated, only seven survived.
Cuomo said that doctors may try an experimental technique of putting as many as four people on a single ventilator. Shortages in other states may eventually prompt similar measures born of desperation, experts say. If there aren’t enough ventilators, one hospital with extras could theoretically lend some to another facility that is running short, said Cathy Chidester, head of the county’s EMS agency. She said she thinks L.A. County won’t be inundated at once, because of how spread out the region is.
Experts say these end-of-life decisions will be particularly tough for people to accept in America, where much more money is typically spent to keep very sick people alive than in the rest of the world.
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