Table 1.

Triage Metrics Considered, Together with a Summary of Their Rationale and Some of the Controversies They Generated

Triage Metric	Rationale	Controversies
Prognosis	Prioritize patients who have better odds to survive treatment or better odds to survive on a longer term	Short-term prognosis is consensual, but controversies arise when considering long-term survival, which can be affected by comorbidities unrelated to the probability of surviving treatment, especially when these comorbidities are more frequent in patients from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Quality of life	Prioritize patients without comorbidities that may affect quality of life after surviving the disease	Deprioritizing patients with impaired physical ability, dementia, cerebral damage, or yet other conditions could breach the ethics of nondiscrimination.
Age	Maximize saved life-years (or opportunities to experience life stages) among patients with a similar prognosis	Deprioritizing older patients solely because of their age may breach the ethics of nondiscrimination, especially when an age cutoff is defined as an exclusion criterion.
Social value (past)	Prioritize health care workers who contracted the disease in the line of duty	Many guidelines prohibit the use of social value, only to make an exception for health care workers, which may seem unfair to other key workers.
Social value (future)	Prioritize health care workers to preserve their ability to fight the disease in the future	It is not always clear whether health care workers can be back to work in a realistic time frame and whether the logic should be extended to other key workers.