If your lungs fail, a ventilator forcefully pushes air into your already damaged lungs and can potentially injure them even more. It’s not like a dialysis machine which bypasses the kidneys and does the work for them. Intubating a patient can sometimes cause more harm than good.

Doctors should always assess every intervention for its risks and benefits and not just do a procedure because you feel like doing something. That’s unethical and dangerous. Many patients can be put in prone position, carefully monitored, or have high flow oxygen less invasively.

For patients with COVID-19 who are intubated, we are now seeing mortality rates approaching 90%. That means that there is little evidence that intubation even helps with survival, may cause more harm than good, and puts people through an invasive procedure without clear benefits.