Politics - News Analysis

Watch Fox News Doctor: Time to ‘Survive or Die,’ Many May Have to Come Off Ventilators

Our friends at Rawstory bring us some sad reality as relayed by Fox News expert Dr. Nicole Saphier on Sunday. Dr. Saphier says that we may be coming to a point where Covid-19 patients must be taken off the ventilators without regard to whether they can breathe on their own. It is a matter of supply:

“There’s going to be more deaths this coming week,” Saphier said on Fox & Friends. “The reason I try and explain that to people is although our rates of hospitalization are going down, that is a good thing.”

I am not sure where she is getting the information that the rates of hospitalizations are going down, but I am sure she knows more than me, and it is a good thing if they are going down.

“But we’re going to start seeing more deaths,” she continued. “Because the people that are having to be in the ICU on the ventilators, they are being kept on the ventilators from anywhere one to four weeks.”

“And they’re either going to survive or they’re either going to die,” she added. “Some of the mortality rates coming out of China are ranging from 60 to 90% of people on the ventilators [who die]. Thankfully, here in the United States, that number varies.”

This may sound callous but there is no way for it not to sound callous when there are not enough ventilators to handle the patients requiring them. I having spoken to an intensive care specialist this week, (my father), who laid it out this way: “If you are running short on ventilators, and you have a 95-year-old man who has been on a vent for 2 weeks without any progress, and a 50-year-old come in the ER in acute respiratory distress, you likely are in a scenario where triage means giving the younger man a chance to improve in the short term over the one who hasn’t even after weeks.”

I am fully aware that it is heart-breaking. But short of a world where there is a ventilator available for both people, those are the calls that doctors are preparing themselves to make. This doctor on Fox seems to understand that it will be difficult.

Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom
meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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