Doctors "Give Up" on people all the time. If you have advanced pancreatic cancer, are 85 and a heavy smoker, most doctors are going to suggest you go home and spend your last few days with loved ones.
What I see at the moment on HN and elsewhere is a lot of people who seem to believe that in Italy the hospitals are already overrun and people are being turned away in large numbers because all the beds are gone already days ago.
But this doesn't match what is actually happening there, according to the Italian government. What they're saying is so far they've had to turn away noone; that everyone who needs treatment is getting it.
I think this mismatch is coming from a couple of places. One is mis-interpreting doctors switching off life support for patients who can theoretically be kept alive using e.g. ECMO but for whom their lungs are destroyed and they wouldn't really have a life afterwards. That's terribly sad but isn't the same thing as patients who are in the middle of making a full recovery being switched off, or people who could be saved being denied beds because there just aren't enough. Another is a confusion between "we're about to run out of beds" and "we think we're about to run out of beds".
I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of the situation here, but we have also have to keep our heads and double check things being claimed about that seriousness, as it's always tempting in times of crisis to lose our heads and go full sandwich-board. Maybe by tomorrow Italy will actually be there, but as of yesterday at least, it seems they aren't.
The confusion probably comes from the definition of treatment. It's possible for simultaneously nobody to be turned away due to lack of a bed, whilst terminal cases they know they can't save are now being turned off quicker i.e. less aggressive intervention than before. That's what Grasselli is saying:
Lombardy intensive care coordinator Grasselli said he believed that, so far, all patients with a reasonable chance of recovering and living an acceptable quality of life had been treated. But he added that this approach is under strain. “Previously, for some people we would have said, ‘let’s give them a chance for a few days.’ Now we have to be more stringent.”
So if you have a terminal cancer and get coronavirus that means you don't get a ventilator. That's the nice part.
The next part is "living an acceptable" quality of life. This probably means anyone not brain damaged and anyone they think won't require oxygen later. Might mean people not currently on oxygen when they get covid-19.
And despite all of that he says that this system is under strain.
