Triage is the answer. But that would be worst case scenario. So all other options are out the window too, which means:
1) 100% of all hospitals on the island are full
2) Air lifting to "outer islands" are not possible cause they're full too
3) Other facilities are set up by hospitals (parking lot, cafeteria, etc...) are full
4) National Guard/military help is maxed out (military triage tents set up at say Aloha Stadium) are full
If your son is turned away and dies, then that means he was so critical that he died. So negligence on the hospital for not recognizing the seriousness. Compared to someone who has CV who isn't in immediate danger of dying. On a side note, this is what England does if someone comes into the ER due to "free healthcare". Unless you're dying, you're told to come back later.
This is why I posted about asking why aren't the good treatments being utilized? Instead people are told to recover the natural way. Read the post about my client. I don't remember if it was here or in the CV thread. LMK if you want me to retype.
Read the post about the you vs. them above. That's basically what's happening and only the weak minded are falling for it. Luckily, you're not falling for it like how someone else is. We have seen this tactic used many times recently. Trump vs. DNC, Blue Line vs. liberals, White vs. Black, etc...Now it's vaxxed vs. unvaxxed. And it's the vaxx pushers who are wanting to make life difficult for the unvaxxed. So guess which side they're on.
KHON2 news this morning said about 98% of state workers are vaxxed. About 1K are not. 80 something applied for religious exceptions. The state wants to charge $200 extra a month for health insurance. Then add in the weekly test of $150. Lets make it so expensive that now someone is forced to get vaxxed. I can go on and on about their plan to force the vaxx, but I'll just end it here.
Sure, the general answer would be triage but I think it is undeniable that other things are at play. This isn't the same as trying to figure out who to treat after a building collapse or terrorist incident, here we have people who made a choice that contributed to the situation.
Consider also that the overloaded hospitals isn't just going to take a toll on emergency room needs where someone with a stroke is being pitted against a covid patient. Hospitals being overloaded is going to mean other essential services are going to be delayed or not done. Screenings for cancers, transplants, etc. One Dr. I met shooting told me of a patient who had a small cancer that should have been cut out but it was delayed in part due to covid. When the patient came back in the tumor had grown and spread.
As to your question about other good treatments, as far as I have read and looked into it, there really aren't any that are known to be effective. Some were studied and not found to be effective. Others are currently in trials. Ivermectin for example, a neurotoxin used to kill parasites and there was some reason to believe it may work against some forms of viral infections. It is currently in trials but last I heard it didn't look very promising.
I think we must strive not to turn this into a moral judgement and look at it purely as a logistical matter. There are two other instances that I think can help to think through this issue.
1. There was a small town on the mainland somewhere that was experiencing a lot of heroine/opioid overdoses to the point that ambulances were expensing large amounts of their budgets on the Narcan drug used to save them and it threatened to make them run out of money. The city decided that if they had already saved the same patient 3 times from an overdose that they would no longer use the Narcan on them. There is certanly a moral angle, afterall these people are doing it to themselves, but there is also a logistical aspect, it is simply unsustainable and if someone overdosed 3 times there is good reason to believe they would continue to overdose.
2. Some companies have decided to ban employees from smoking even when not at work because the companies cover the employee portion of the health insurance. They ran the numbers and knew that they would save a lot of money through cheaper premiums if their employees were less sick because they didn't smoke. There is the moral question of "why should my insurance be higher because you make yourself more sick" but there is also the simple numbers game of sicker employees cost more.
We can look at the decision of how to triage people when/if hospitals get overrun both as a moral judgement but also as a logistical decision. We can say that people chose to skip the vaccine and place themselves in obvious danger and use that as a rationale on who to treat first. But I think a logistical argument could also be made to arrive at that decision to treat the vaccinated first. A hospital can know that if the unvaccinated people know they will get turned away then this creates an incentive for people to get vaccinated which will then serve to reduce the problem of the overcrowding.