people who end up intubated stand a real chance of dying.
Hmm. I'm not really trying to argue that you are wrong. I'm currently hunkered down. While I resent what I feel is government overreach in the liberty/safety balance, I'm happy enough to be careful on my own recognizance. But the following had me scratching my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDsKdeFOmQI realize that this is an uncorroborated report, and it is anecdotal if true, at that. But it seems sincere, and has me questioning the entire medical response to this thing. At least in my mind.
edit: I see Tash beat me to it. Whatevs.
Just looked over a few minutes - and it seems the initial premise is that people marked negative for test were still 'presumed' Covid positive.
OK, but... it is entirely plausible that:
1. People were not tested, but obviously suffering classic symptoms.
2. Test results were taking hours (at best) to even come back - if someone is an emergency admission and short of breath at dangerous levels - as a doctor, you need to act and make a decision. I assume we are not arguing that thousands of people were dying.
3. Tests were simply not showing positive, since they were unreliable. A positive test is rarely wrong, but false negatives do exist - tests were then (and are still) not infallible.
Her assertion that they not ill and were only short of breath 'due to stress' is a bit of a stretch IMHO. Testing being fallible - or (because of time taken to even get results) being skipped in cases where someone is obviously lacking blood oxygen, seems a more likely explanation than deliberately using up ventilators for people with no real need.
Pulse oximeters are ubiquitous in hospitals and damn quick to reliably show dangerously low oxygen levels. People panicking get high results, people short of breath due to pneumonia get low ones.
OK, that ventilators are not the best clinical option
may or many not prove to be the case. At this time there was no better option, since people with not enough oxygen tend to die pretty quickly.