It’s not a cakewalk for the elderly. I think some patients would want to remain communicative with loved ones rather than fade away unconscious over weeks.

We should be upfront about the odds of a full recovery and allow room for thoughtful discussion around patients’ wishes. The frenzied environment of ICUs during a pandemic isn’t conducive to this, so we need to be deliberate and talk about it as a country. The “job one is saving lives” rhetoric may not be best for patients and their families.

I’ve seen nurses and doctors on Twitter mention that “every patient needs to be fixated, as they experience a feeling of drowning or asphyxiation and try to remove the tube”

I’m not sure if that experience is caused by the ventilation, or by the disease and misattributed. In any case, I’ve decided not to get infected by this bug. And if I fail at that, I might even consider a living will excluding ventilation.

Are they intubating COVID-19 patients without general anesthesia? I've been in the hospital a month due to pneumonia and have been intubated 3 times. The second and third times they did intubation and extubation all under general.

The first time they put some kind of special tube in under general. When I came to 3 days later there was no ventilator, and the end of the tube was in my throat. It felt like a rectangular block. They extubated me while I was awake and immediately put me on high flow oxygen. They would've intubated me on the spot if I couldn't breathe. Never felt a gagging sensation in this instance.

it's a natural reaction to having a thing down your throat. i woke up in the ICU once with a tube in. my wrists were bound down so I wouldn't pull it out (which i would have, in my newly awakened stupor). once awake and lucid i was fine to have hands freed.

It is true, if you are conscious you will try to remove the tube (self-extubation), as it makes you gag. But that means that sedation is too low, which could be because they don't have time to monitor everybody.

And/or they have shitty monitoring equipment made by legacy players in an industry that needs disrupting. I mean yes there are staffing issues as well, but both can be true.

so, it seems like personel IS a bottleneck which is not going away by 3D-printing a million of ventilators.