Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

by Sheri Fink

FIFTY PATIENTS, six outlets. How to decide? Evans had access to something the doctors at Memorial did not. In 2008, citing the arrests of the Memorial health professionals and fears that a severe influenza outbreak could emerge and force providers, again, into making life-and-death choices between patients, New York planners published a protocol for rationing ventilators. The guidelines, devised by experts in disaster medicine, bioethics, and public policy, were designed to go into effect if the United States was ever struck by a pandemic comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which sickened more than a quarter of the population, overwhelmed hospitals, and killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide—the most deadly disease event in recent history. When state health department officials ran exercises based on scenarios involving H5N1 avian influenza—a strain