The last bed dilemma burns out COVID-19 triage: A viewpoint from Medical and Law students

摘要

COVID-19 S footprint As of March 11th, 2020, COVID-19 has been declared a global pandemic. On April 10th, Italy and USA reached respectively 143,626 and 425,889 total confirmed cases with a death toll of 18,281 and 14,665 [1 ]. Between February 20th and March 18th, the COVID-19 Lombardy ICU Network managed 1300 affected patients with acute respiratory failure demanding ICU admissions. Of those, 99% needed respiratory support [2]. Data that show how overwhelmed the healthcare system is, thus requiring the implementation of triage protocols to properly allocate the medical resources. Triage in theory. As its etymology suggests, trier means the culling, the sorting and allocation of patients, treatments or resources, historically