Corona Triage
Abstract
Triage – this is the sorting of patients in groups to be treated preferentially or subordinately when the mass of patients vastly exceeds the available resources. It has always been a delicate and stressful procedure. The Italian Society for Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care Medicine (SIAARTI) has recently given recommendations to intensive care physicians who are currently no longer able to provide lung ventilators to all Covid-19 patients in need. The aim of those recommendations was to relieve the practitioners of the burden of taking personal responsibility for the selection decisions and to make the criteria explicit and communicable. The criteria, or so the authors propose, should also be made accessible to those affected and to their families to maintain trust in the public health service. If the criteria are now made public, one must however be allowed to comment on them. This is what I intend to do here.
