The urge to build more intensive care unit beds and ventilators: Intuitive but errant

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, much attention has been devoted to the fraught question of how to allocate intensive care unit beds and mechanical ventilators if the supply of these resources is insufficient to provide them to all patients considered to be in need. The authors believe that the deployment of aggressive medical technology to win the “war” against the pandemic may represent the triumph of deeply human instincts over optimal policy.