Investigating Ethical Tradeoffs in Crisis Standards of Care through Simulation of Ventilator Allocation Protocols.
Jonathan HeringtonJessica ShandJeanne Holden-WiltseAnthony CorbettRichard DeesChin-Lin ChingMargie ShawXueya CaiMartin S ZandPublished in: medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences (2024)
While there is significant variance in the number of lives saved and life-years saved, we did not find a tradeoff between saving the most lives and saving the most life-years. Moreover, concerns about racial discrimination in triage protocols require thinking carefully about the tradeoff between enforcing equality of survival rates and maximizing the lives saved in each sub-population.