A US doctor has shared a video explaining how medical professional choose which patient gets treated when resources are limited - you can see the clip here:
Posting on TikTok Dr Siyab - or @drsiyabmd as he's known on the platform, asked his 198,000 followers to try and guess which of two patients would receive treatment first.
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In the clip, the doctor described a fictional scenario in which there were two very poorly patients - one a 75-year-old grandfather of three who had opted to get vaccinated to keep himself and his family safe, and the other a 30-year-old man who was recently married with a baby on the way, who had chosen not to get the vaccine as he didn't trust it.
In a follow up clip Dr Syiab explained that the person's vaccine status has nothing to do with the decision making and that medics will.
He said: "First of all, let me make something clear - someone's vaccination status does not factor into their treatment at all.
"We do not care if you've been vaccinated or not vaccinated. We treat everybody the same.
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"However, as I said before healthcare is a finite resource, so when you have treatment options like ECMO [Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy] that are very limited you have to prioritise which patient gets them first and the way we determine that is by looking at the whole clinical picture and deciding which patient would be most likely to benefit from that treatment and that's the patient that gets it first.
"And in the scenario that I talked about, it may well be the 30-year-old unvaccinated person just because it's more likely to save his life.
"Now is it fair to the 75-year-old man who got vaccinated, did everything right but still ended up getting Covid? Is it fair to him that he doesn't get the treatment and he might die because he couldn't get it in time?
"Some people would say that's not fair - but, you know, it doesn't matter.
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"As healthcare professionals we don't care about vaccination status, we put that aside, we put our personal biases aside and we treat people the same, no matter what."
The post has attracted plenty of comments, many from fellow healthcare professionals.
One posted: "The general public just don't understand this type of dilemma we go through. It's difficult to sleep at night."
While someone else wrote: "I am a nurse who works on a cardiac medical ICU and got trained on ECMO for Covid and we had to ration ECMO and make these horrible decisions."
Featured Image Credit: TikTok/@drsiyabmdTopics: Viral, Interesting, TikTok