[Hello...this is America .]
2 weeks ago, when the US daily death number was 23, if you had said to me that we’d be within striking distance of Italy’s daily death count, I’d have dismissed that worry. But that’s where we are today, with 741 dead for 5/31 vs Italy’s 837. Eye-grabbing headlines aside, ventilators don’t matter much. According to a Lancet article, 92% of people (i.e. 6 out of 7) who needed ventilators have eventually died. That’s another way of saying that only 1 out of 7 people on ventilators survive. And this was with triage, with 65 and older patients with pre-existing conditions excluded from the limited ventilator pool.