Forced Triage: Allocating Ventilators and Legal Liability in the COVID Crisis

As the COVID-19 crisis deepens across the United States and its full impact yet to be realized, health care providers are confronting the real possibility that hospital beds and ventilators will be in short supply. They may have to make difficult triage decisions, assigning priority to certain patients over others. How do health care providers typically make these decisions? Can they be criminally or civilly liable for meting out treatment or ventilators? Professor Glenn Cohen explains and advocates states’ attorneys general to consider these questions now to best immunize health care providers against liability as they navigate this challenging and unprecedented crisis.

 

  Professor Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law School is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics and the law, as well as health law. He is the faculty director of Harvard Law's Petrie-Flom Center.