It’s no accident that people describe something that’s calculated, cold, and unemotional as “clinical.” Taking care of people’s health isn’t emotion-free by any means, but the clinic is where physicians and nurses have to make life-and-death decisions under time pressure—including which patients go first, and what kind of care they get. When resources like, say, ventilators, intensive care beds, oxygen, staff, and time are scarce, that decisionmaking is called triage. And last week, The Dallas Morning News reported that some Texas hospitals were considering a massive change to how they do it. The question in play: Would it make sense to take into account the vaccination status of their Covid patients? With ICUs filling up with severely ill Covid-19 patients and a shortage of beds and nurses, should clinicians (all other things being equal) care for vaccinated people before—or differently than—unvaccinated ones?

Now, that hasn’t happened, and probably won’t. The idea came from a memo from the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guideline Task Force, a regional organization of physicians, nurses, and other stakeholders, who developed the procedures for hospitals to follow during rough times like a pandemic. The team that wrote the memo rushed to say they weren’t pushing a new policy, just trying to talk it out. “People are burned out, they’re exhausted, they’re angry. So one of the questions that’s been coming up is: Can we consider a patient’s vaccine status if we’re making a triage decision?” says Robert Fine, a physician and co-chair of the team that wrote the memo about vaccine status. “No decisions were made,” Fine says. “We urged the task force, ‘Please share this with your triage and ethics committees and your clinical care doctors so we can continue this discussion.’”

The memo Fine mentions was of the “Come on, we’re all thinking it” school of talking points—which is a good thing! It would’ve been a troubling change, to say the least. Emergency rooms are legally required to care for everyone, no matter what sets of decisions got them there—it doesn’t matter if you’re the innocent cyclist or the seat-belt-eschewing drunk driver who crashed into them. And then after admission, a hospital’s care guidelines define what treatment patients get. Texas doesn’t have statewide guidelines for critical care and triage, which means that caregivers are left to their own local organizing. But tough times like the ones brought on by low vaccination rates and the Delta variant require a reexamination of priors. This fourth wave of Covid hospitalizations differs from all the others, because almost everyone who is severely ill is also unvaccinated. In Texas, more than 12,800 people are in the hospital because of Covid-19, and between 93 and 98 percent of them are unvaccinated. It’s tempting to blame this wave not on the virus but on the people who didn’t get their shots. “This has been bubbling up—this anger, this frustration, this fear, this worry. Every day, we’re seeing the ascent of the curve. Now it’s the steepest it’s ever been,” Fine says. “So I and the other leaders of the task force, we decided, you know, these numbers are not looking good. These questions are coming up.”

Sure. You get it, right? “I have tremendous empathy for the doctors and particularly for the nurses there. It’s just a terrible situation they’re in. They’re working as hard as they can, under great stress, and the patients and families often lash out at them and they’re not grateful,” says Bernard Lo, director emeritus of the Program in Medical Ethics at UC San Francisco and author of Resolving Ethical Dilemmas: A Guide for Clinicians. “It’s really hard to take care of people thinking that they could have done something very simple: Get two shots that would have avoided this, in the overwhelming majority of cases.”

The problem, as Fine and Lo readily acknowledge, is that’s really not how triage is supposed to work. It’s a complicated medical and ethical issue, but the plainest version is that the most effort goes to the people most likely to survive. That’s not always easy to determine in advance, and in places hardest hit by the pandemic, triage has always been tricky, because the disease differentially affects poor people and ethnic minorities. Triage guidelines are there to keep clinicians from unintentionally giving in to their biases, to make sure treatment is equitable and ethical in all the ways the disease and society are not. Worse, if resources are unlimited, you don’t have to triage—so clinics with less money have to do more triage and they’re also, by dint of their locations and populations served, also most likely to see the people most affected by the disease.