Who Lives When COVID Overwhelms ICU?

You call it arithmetic; I call it a slippery slope to barbarism. Your 'triage' logic sounds clean in a spreadsheet, but in a real hospital, it turns doctors into gods deciding who is 'worthy' of life. And your metric—age—is the crudest, most discriminatory proxy imaginable. You assume a 25-year-old has 'more life ahead,' but what about the 70-year-old who is the sole caregiver for a disabled grandchild? What about the 60-year-old scientist on the verge of a vaccine breakthrough? Your numbers measure years, not value. And by that logic, you would have let Stephen Hawking die at 21 because his 'statistical' future was grim. You are not maximizing outcomes; you are maximizing your own convenience. You cite mortality rates as if they are destiny. But those rates are not fixed—they are shaped by the very care you are rationing. An elderly patient with COVID might have a 90 percent mortality in a crowded ICU, but that number drops dramatically with early intervention, a ventilator, and a team that fights for them. You are using a self-fulfilling prophecy to justify your bias. And your comparison to liver transplants is a straw man. We do not deny livers based on age alone; we base it on medical urgency, compatibility, and chance of survival—factors that vary within every age group. A fit 80-year-old can outlive a sickly 30-year-old. Your 'arithmetic' ignores that nuance because nuance is inconvenient. But the deepest flaw in your argument is the moral precedent it sets. Once you accept that some lives are 'worth more,' you open the door to rationing by income, by disability, by race. During COVID, we already saw Black and brown communities die at higher rates—not because of biology, but because of systemic neglect. Your 'efficient' triage would formalize that injustice. You say the young have 'more to contribute,' but who decides that? A homeless teenager? A disabled veteran? Your metric deems them expendable. That is not utilitarianism; it is eugenics with a calculator. You accuse me of sentimentality, but I accuse you of cowardice. It takes courage to say 'I will not choose' and to fight for more beds, more ventilators, more staff. It takes no courage to shrug and say 'the old must die.' Your logic is a surrender to failure, not a solution to it. And if you truly believe a 20-year-old's life is 'worth more,' then you have already lost the very humanity you claim to protect. History will judge you not for making hard choices, but for making the easy, cruel ones.