I think this refrain is a bit over-simplified. TLDR it's a complex evolving situation, lots of uncertainty, insufficient specialists to handle the new influx, & no protocols around effective treatment leaving all doctors to do their best in the face of lots of unknowns.
Do we have sufficient ventilators for everyone who would need it? Probably. Are there not enough in practice? Yes. Why? We don't know how to differentiate between who needs it and who doesn't effectively. So people are getting put on them excessively to try to save the ones for whom it would help and we have no way currently to distinguish those people better. Should we fill this knowledge gap? Absolutely. I'm sure doctors & researchers are scrambling to do that.
https://time.com/5820556/ventilators-covid-19/
> But Dr. David Hill, a pulmonary and critical care physician who treats COVID-19 patients in Waterbury, Conn. and serves as a volunteer medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association, says arguments against COVID-19 ventilation have been over-simplified. It may be less that ventilators aren’t the proper treatment for coronavirus, and more that they’re not a panacea for a pandemic that has pushed the health care system to its breaking point, Hill argues.
> “You have really sick people, [while] the people who have the best training are in short supply and ventilator management is not simple,” Hill says. If a dedicated lung specialist were available for each patient, he believes, outcomes would probably be better. They could make the subtle adjustments required for effective long-term ventilation, or try less-invasive options and only move to intubation when absolutely necessary. But with many hospitals nearly at capacity, last resorts can become first resorts.
> Few doctors are saying COVID-19 patients should never be ventilated, but there is a growing subset that thinks it’s happening too quickly.
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> Dr. Ken Lyn-Kew, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health in Colorado, agrees that there are some differences between classic ARDS and COVID-19, but he emphasizes that there’s a lot of variation among COVID-19 patients he’s treated. He says most still meet the criteria for an ARDS diagnosis. In his view, coronavirus patients likely have ARDS plus other issues, but they still have ARDS. With so much unknown, and with treatment protocols being updated on the fly, he thinks it’s too soon for doctors to go off-book and avoid conventional protocols like mechanical ventilation.
> “The world is not a dichotomous, black-and-white place, but a lot of people are having trouble with that,” Lyn-Kew says. “We might be able to do better, but in the absence of data on the way to do that, we need to follow our societal guidelines and 25 years of research.”