Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic surge, the demand for ICU beds far exceeds its supply in the hospitals. The healthcare team had to confront themselves with an ethical dilemma of distributing the limited beds to patients who required ICU admission and therefore needed to prioritize. This paper examines various ethical theories and principles that were used during the pandemic in assigning patients to ICU beds and proposes an algorithm to aid in decision making for ICU bed assignment in order to achieve a fair allocation of this scarce resource.
