If 1 percent of those critical influenza victims need ventilators, we can probably handle it. If 3 percent need them, forget it; we just don’t have enough machines in the country, and neither does any other country. Even if they did, do you think they would lend them to us? That means a lot of people would die even though we have the technology to save them. We’d get into triage and issues of allocation and hard choices no one wants to confront.
