Would there be risk of contamination from other diseases that patients may have? I agree with your general expectation that risky reuse over high-probability death seems strongly preferable. One tricky moral dilemma is what to do if you have 1 clean valve, 1 dirty valve, and 2 patients.

> One tricky moral dilemma is what to do if you have 1 clean valve, 1 dirty valve, and 2 patients.

Why would this be trickier than having 1 clean valve, 0 dirty valves, and 2 patients?

Well it's exactly the same after you make the choice/use the first valve.

> what to do if you have 1 clean valve, 1 dirty valve, and 2 patients

"Just received word from an ICU doctor at a small NY hospital: They are officially out of ventilators and are now double venting patients with COVID (using the same ventilator for 2 infected patients)."

Absolutely insane. It's barely started.

Triage as you would anyway (same prioritization), or flip a coin.

I think you'd at least want to sterilize it. Not sure if it's the case with these things, but other devices like endoscopes have enough cracks and crevices for stuff to hide so they have to go through an acid wash instead of steam, so the plastic probably wouldn't survive. Stuff like that either has to be non-corrosive metal or disposable.

Wouldn’t plunging them in a solution with high concentration of alcohol do the trick? (Not a medical professional, asking out of curiosity).

There are much better 'disinfectants': alcohol is good at killing living cells, but doesn't do a great job killing spores or penetrating into protein-rich....gunk.

You would probably want to use a "high-level disinfectant" or "sterilant" instead. Gluteraldyhde is fairly common choice or ethylene oxide gas, though both can be fairly nasty if not handled carefully (which is, of course, the whole point).

More emphatically: do not trust alcohol at any concentration to kill pathogens. (Likewise, freezing.)

The way alcohol swaps are used, they move contaminants away from the needle insertion site, and the alcohol helps to dislodge them. And, of course, it does kill some kinds of pathogen, as does soap.