Grim Calculus Prioritizes Health Workers as Hospitals Swell

ICU beds and ventilators shouldn’t be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Health-care workers should get priority. Patients with a better chance of recovery should get access to limited life-saving equipment over those who are sicker.

Those and other guidelines were released Monday by a group of global medical experts and bioethicists, aiming to provide a dispassionate framework for decision making as some hospitals face a surge of patients suffering severe infections from the new coronavirus. The report’s departure point is grim: Rationing of life-saving equipment will be necessary in some places, in spite of hospitals’ and authorities’ best efforts to boost intensive-care units and ventilators. In other areas, rationing of life-saving care is already under way.