With the number of resources decreasing and the number of patients rising, healthcare professionals at the front lines of this pandemic have had to make tough and sometimes heartbreaking choices - if you have one ventilator and three different patients, who do you give it to? In the United States, hospitals and states are rushing to offer some sort of ethical guideline to ensure that individual doctors do not have to make these decisions by themselves. However, in places like Italy, which has been devastatingly struck by COVID-19, doctors have to make some of these decisions by themselves. And, soon, America may reach a point where it comes to that.

The issue is that there is no nationally agreed-upon triage system. Right now, its more of an every-hospital-for-themselves approach. But the reason for this is not just medical, but political. Some fear that a national guideline would allow families, whose affected members were not prioritized under the system to point a finger at the government and say, "You killed my mom, dad, or grandparent." While this is understandable, a patchwork system like the one we have not is incredibly inefficient. With so many people dangerously ill, hospitals do not have time to weigh all the possibilities of every individual case, so we need a unified system to have the quickest and fairest outcome in each state.

But what would a federal guideline need to consider?

A final option to bypass a guideline is a lottery system. A literal random decision to choose who gets a ventilator. The issue with this is that it may not be in the best interest of an efficient ending to the pandemic. We want to save as many people as we can as fast as we can and that requires tough decisions. But then the actual problem reveals itself: we have an administration that refuses to make those tough decisions.

Trump refuses to take accountability for any action, including triage guidelines and mandatory social distancing orders, and forces the states and hospitals to make their own so that he is not to blame. So where does the burden fall? On the healthcare professionals. Trump wants people to blame doctors, hospitals, state governors, anybody except himself for the crisis that he put us in with his delayed response. When someone's grandmother, mother, father, or sibling dies, he wants the family to point the finger at the doctors who are working day and night at the front lines, while he sits safely in the White House watching the country burn when he's the one who lit the match.