That makes ventilation an absolutely last ditch effort. It means if the ~60,000 ventilators already in US hospitals before this started were each used just once ever to ventilate a COVID patient, you would expect 48,000 of those patients to die.
I’m sure this also has a pretty significant effect on the ICU utilization rate as a percentage of hospitalizations.
And this is besides the fact that early serological testing points to the overall hospitalization rate being significantly lower than 10%.
You seem to believe that the ventilators are causing deaths. There's plenty of evidence to show that once Covid-19 takes hold it is particularly viscous because of the number of things that it does to the body.
Some of the things that go wrong in some cases include: lung damage (obviously), kidney damage, liver damage, strokes, encephalitis, seizures, heart damage, meningitis, bloody diarrhea etc[1].
I agree the death date of people on ventilators are horrifying. But I don't think there is much evidence that ventilators are causing that rather than being administered to people who already have serious symptoms.
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus...
All we have is anecdotal reports, plus the fact that significantly more COVID patients die on ventilation than the average pneumonia patient who is [invasively] ventilated.
Since doctors were ventilating patients at the same O2 saturation points as usual, we can say at least that something is markedly different with COVID induced ARDS from typical ARDS that makes invasive ventilation particularly insufficient, if not actively harmful.
I was referring to the idea that is going around that "we don’t have any coronavirus vaccines" is somehow significant and means it is especially hard to make one.
> Regarding ventilators
I think the NY Times article is good, but it's important to note that this is evolving and treatments are changing. But saying "some doctors say they're trying to keep patients off ventilators as long as possible, and turning to other techniques instead" is very different to "ventilators have proven to be basically lethal to COVID patients".