Is it ethical to use age to guide triage decisions in a pandemic?

Abstract

The initial weeks and months of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020 were a time of incredible uncertainty for the intensive care community. Reports were emerging, particularly from northern Italy, of intensive care units (ICUs) being rapidly overwhelmed by large numbers of patients with respiratory failure from COVID-19, and of intensivists having to make seemingly impossible decisions about who to admit to the ICU and who to leave on theward. 1 These decisions were being made with the reasonable expectation that those left on the ward would die. There were widespread reports of age being used as a determinant of ICU admission, which generated some controversy both in the medical literature and in the lay press.