Is it more compassionate to save twenty people, or a hundred?
Triage assumes that there aren't enough resources to help everyone at once. Someone has to be at the front of the line and someone at the end; it's not a deli, where help is first come, first served.
Priority goes to those people who are in most urgent need of care. If resources are strained, the next priority is those who are most likely to be savable. Is it "compassionate" for a team of doctors to spend hours working on one patient who's likely to die anyway, while a dozen patients who could be saved die waiting for a doctor?
You just said it - those who are savable. These guidelines go *beyond* that and decide who's worth saving. They aren't saying "who's sickest - who has the greatest possibility of surviving this disease". They're saying, "We aren't even going to ask that. Certain groups of people won't even be considered."
Please try to understand, it’s not this flu that bothers me. I have every confidence that it’s weird, but not even close to as serious as the media is letting on. I’m sure we’ll all be fine.
What bothers me is that you guys can’t realize that this is a policy change that signals a fundamental shift of *morality* within our medical system. In the event of serious pandemic, this can go to the point where they cut off life-saving medicine to healthy, non-infected disabled people. (IE: Not giving my kid his insulin or denying an asthmatic an inhaler.)