B.C.’s Medical Health Officer says no doctor will have to decide on their own who lives and who dies based on ventilator shortages, should the COVID-19 pandemic worsens in Canada.

Dr. Bonnie Henry was speaking after a doctor in Nanaimo raised concerns about decisions like that – similar to what is being done in Italy – where the health care system is nearing a breaking point.

“We have an ethical framework and we have a provincial framework that supports how those decisions might be made, if and when they were ever necessary,” she said on Saturday. “But all of our planning is to support each facility around the province to make sure that we can react to where people are where people are needing care.”

Henry says B.C.’s ethical framework guidelines have been around since the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

“Thankfully we didn’t have to use some of those decision making principles. We refined it and developed it during the Ebola onset, thankfully we didn’t have to use it again, and it is in place now and I am hopeful that with everything that we are doing, we will never come to that again,” said Henry.

In Italy, which reported 793 new deaths on Saturday, and 4,825 total deaths so far, many doctors and nurses have had to prioritize who gets treatment in hospital and who doesn’t based on the age and other underlying health conditions of the respective patients needing critical-care.

As of Saturday, there were 27 people with COVID-19 symptoms in B.C. who are in hospital, 12 of those are in intensive care.

Health Minister Adrian Dix on Friday said by cancelling non-urgent elective surgery, the province has been able to free up beds in hospitals for people who need it. He says the acute care system in B.C. is at 78.5 per cent capacity, while critical care beds are at 62 per cent capacity.