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Isn't normal triage designed to optimize the number of patients cured or some similar metric? How does that not "cut it"?
by jonathanstrange 7y ago
Isn't normal triage designed to optimize the number of patients cured or some similar metric? How does that not "cut it"?
- khafra 7y agoI believe he's saying that "improving triage" is like tuning the engine of your Civic before you run a quarter mile against a top fuel dragster. Technically speaking, it will help, a little. But to actually measure up to the challenge you'd need to completely replace the entire thing with something vastly more capable.
- wcoenen 7y agoI'll try to clarify. The article argues that the death toll from covid-19 is low enough that it doesn't justify shutting down the economy. However, we've seen that hospitals will be overrun with covid-19 cases for a while even with a lockdown, so this would likely be worse without a lockdown. My point is then that, triage or not, there will effectively be no hospital service for a certain period. So you basically have to add the death toll of having no hospitals for a certain period. Avoiding this additional death toll requires refusing corona patients, not just triage. Perhaps the article was arguing that even with covid-19 deaths plus "health care paralysis" deaths, it's still not worth shutting down the economy. In that case my point is moot.