Officials at NYU Langone Health has given its emergency room doctors "sole discretion" to decide which coronavirus patients should get ventilators.
“In Emergency Medicine, we do not have the luxury of time, data, or committees to help with our critical triage decisions,” Robert Femia, head of the NYU Langone Health emergency department wrote in an email. “Senior hospital leadership recognizes this and supports us to use our best clinical judgment.”
Ventilators assist patients with lung damage who have trouble breathing.
The new directive gives emergency room doctors the latitude to choose which patients to treat with ventilators based on need. Patients whose health conditions wouldn't be improved by the use of ventilators could be skipped over in favor of those with a stronger chance of recovery.
On Monday, NYU Langone Medical had 332 coronavirus patients in the hospital, an uptick of 84 percent from Thursday, internal numbers show. During the same period, the number of patients being treated in intensive care doubled to 125.
The number of intensive care patients at NYU Langone Hospital -- Brooklyn between Thursday to Monday shot up from 21 to 36.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the federal government shipped 4,000 ventilators to New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has anticipated the state will need 30,000 ventilators when the pandemic reaches its peak.
“For those patients who you feel intubation will not change their ultimate clinical outcome (for example cardiac arrests, some chronic disease patients at end of life, etc) you will have support in your decision making at the department and institutional level to withhold futile intubations,” Femia said.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.