The real question to ask is how many people who would survive with ventilator die without it.
Actually I read the opposite. That the patients in ICU's are younger 40-70 with the bulk in their 60's, while those dying are mainly 75-100, mostly over 80 years old.
That is: many if not most of those who die never pass the ICU. Obviously people in ICU wards die too, a significant fraction. But the age of the group that die mostly (80+) means it's mostly non-ICU patients. Doctors know a 80 year old with some comorbidity isn't going to survive being tubed. By "survive" they mean survive for X months afterwards too (This number can be e.g. 6 or 12 months to use as a guideline for survivability, to consider ICU treatment).
If it is the case, as you say, that a significant fraction of young people need to go into intensive care to have a chance to recover, that makes this pandemic much worse than most people think.
I do know that the number of hospitalizations is high (and possibly should be higher still, if hospitals were not turning away patients)
COVID-19 still requires very high hospitalization rates, even among young people.
The health care system and market system are broken. More ventilators is the only solution.
The people in charge chose not to buy the correct number of ventilators because of profit.
How can people possibly defend any system that is going to let, in their words, hundreds of thousands of people die, when x% of them could have been saved if money had been spent on equipment instead of buybacks and admin salaries.
People vote for politicians who allocate funds to the healthcare systems (generally). Either people don't expect the disaster to strike, or they are more interested in the lower taxes you can have if you don't prepare for peak demand. I suspect it's a consequence of both.
Any politician who says "When I'm in power, I'll raise taxes 10% to fund preparedness for a disaster that comes every 100 years", will not see office. Short sightedness isn't the same as evil. Humans are bad at imagining worse case scenarios and good at optimizing for short term goals. This is the same in industry. Companies now suffer because they optimized for efficiency not resiliency. Where are the companies that optimized for resiliency so they now continue production becuase they had larger stocks of parts, parts sourced from multiple locations etc? The answer: They are dead because they were out competed by companies who could undercut their prices because they order all their parts from China and keep only 1 day worth of production in their parts warehouse.
Here's a report on the state of things from a New Orleans ER doctor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/fpwc1y/front...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
Of the approximately 50% of patients who were on a ventilator and survived long enough to be released from the hospital, 60% of those survived for at least a year.
I'm curious how that would work out. I think it would have to do with the drugs that are given along side the ventilator, not from the ventilator itself?
>I hope we don't fixate on ventilators too much.
It feels to me like we might be. It'll definitely be needed, but I think there are other issues that aren't getting as much attention; problems that might not seen as solvable by someone in their garage with a 3d printer and some pneumatic valves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator-associated_pneumoni...
The microbes would come from two sources: Inside the system (from a prior patient), and from the air supply.
The former can be mostly prevented by replacing the bag and the tracheal tube, because both are cheap and disposable. Then there are probably some connection pieces and those need to be sterilized or replaced between patients.
The air supply can be run through a relatively low-tech filter if absolutely necessary.
I also recall seeing (again, can't find it right now) a scientist concerned about the potential for widespread usage of ventilators to rapidly increase the prevalence antibiotic resistant bacteria.
My point is, having as many ventilators as we need is good, but it's even better to not need the ventilators in the first place. I hope we don't fixate on ventilators too much at the expense of mitigation and other treatments.