[Mahler9th]

Excerpt from that publication:

"An important aspect of interpreting the results from the model of Huang et al. is the problem of expected unmet demand. There is an upper limit to the number of additional ventilators that any hospital can absorb and use to successfully help treat acutely ill patients needing mechanical ventilation. This limit is determined in large part by the number of trained staff—particularly respiratory therapists, nurses, and technicians—available to ventilate and monitor patients (6). That is, the number of machines is less of a constraint than is availability of trained personnel. Huang et al. allow for expected unmet needs, setting a default value of an acceptable level of 5 patients unable to receive mechanical ventilation at any given time. Assuming a moderate, 2009-type influenza pandemic, the authors estimate a 30% chance of this expected unmet need occurring. To meet this level of unmet demand in Texas, planning for a moderate or a severe pandemic requires stockpiling as few as 1,172 or as many as 15,697 ventilators, respectively. However, actually deploying and using such high volumes of mechanical ventilators would be challenging in terms of having enough hospital space and staff to support additional ventilator use. Thus, during moderate and severe pandemics, a higher level of unmet demand might need to be expected. Attending physicians will have to determine who gets access to the limited number of ventilators and who does not. Only a small number of studies describe how physicians might make such allocation decisions for critical, scarce resources (i.e., triage or prioritization) and how they would explain such decisions to the patients and their families (7–9)."

Well here we are...