A former registered nurse once told me that heart problems typically start as lung problems. Heart stress isn't at all unusual with lung distress. The two systems very much work together.

I have serious lung problems and I used to have arhythmia. I don't have arhythmia anymore. I'm generally healthier than I used to be.

I don't know why the death rate on ventilators is so high. I'm not inclined to do a lot of speculating in that regard, but I know they can promote antibiotic resistant infections and one article suggested the high death rate in Italy may have been fueled at least in part by antibiotic resistant secondary infections.

Not having any real medical knowledge, just as a logical speculation, there is always the possibilitly, that at the point, where people get put on the ventilators, the infection has come to a point where the survivability is extremely low.

That's generally true of ventilator usage. It thus fails to account for the abnormally high death rate of people with Coronavirus put on ventilators as compared to statistical norms for ventilator usage generally.

I think we can conclude only one thing from the number: by the time people are put on ventilators, their survival chance is very low. This certainly means: more ventilators won't save many people - but it may well be, that if 80% of the ventilated patients die, they saved 20% of the patients. That would assume, that the patients had died, if they had not been ventilated. Which of course depends, at which point in the development doctors put patients onto ventilation.

I posted a link in my original comment to a source indicating that's not what doctors are concluding.

It's also not what I'm concluding.

While I'm not a doctor, my life literally depends upon me having a fairly substantial amount of knowledge about things like my lung function. In contrast, you opened with saying you don't have much medical knowledge, this just seems logical to you.

I will suggest you do more reading. Your logic doesn't really hold up in this case.

I found the link you are probably referring to, but the article doesn't give any clear conclusion, other that it is known, that ventilation is a very harmful procedure. I would assume, for that reason, doctors wouldn't use ventilators until there is no other option to keep people breathing. Do you have a source for ventilators being used much earlier? If so, than this is certainly something which should be reconsidered. Is there any other treatment than ventilation, once the oxygene level in the blood drops beyond a certain level?

I feel I've already covered these points. To recap:

Some doctors are currently making a concerted effort to intentionally delay or avoid use of ventilators because they are concerned about the alarmingly high death rate associated with them. On the face of it, this implicitly admits that doctors haven't heretofore been exhausting all other treatment modalities before ordering use of a ventilator.

I don't know how to answer your last question. I've talked extensively about my firsthand experience with using alternative treatment modalities with my life threatening lung issues, but I'm not a doctor and I don't really have the background to assert anything more than I've already covered, which, as usual, is being dismissed by some commenters as anecdata.

Since I've already qualified it up front as "my firsthand personal experience," it seems entirely pointless to belabor any points about my opinions.

If the opinions of some random internet stranger (aka me) don't satisfy you and the opinions of medical professionals in the source I posted don't either, I think you probably need to do some digging to come up with the sorts of info that interest you.

That line about lung problems being the primary cause for heart problems got to be wrong, without context...

I've already given the source: it was the opinion of a medical professional I was friends with.

You can readily Google the idea and come up with multiple articles indicating that lung problems can cause heart problems and heart problems can cause lung problems. As I stated above, the heart and lungs work closely together, so it's not uncommon to have problems with both at the same time.

(Please kindly don't try to tell me that's not what I said. It's 3am here and these are comments on a forum, not a PhD thesis. I'm telling you it means the same thing to me. I've given my clarification as best I can and I didn't say "primarily," I said typically, which really doesn't sound the same to me. Given how the heart and lungs work, I think my friend was likely correct that the direction of cause and effect typically starts with the lungs and goes to the heart from there, but not always, of course.)

For me, "typically" does mean a majority of cases.

I'm "only" a Veterinarian, so I'm not quite current in the distribution of how this works in Humans, but from my understanding it's normally the heart that affects the lungs, not the other way around.

That statement might be true inside a specific context, like infections, maybe.

To me, primarily suggests something like "we have hard data showing that 90 percent of cases absolutely start with the lungs" and typically is more like "I have professional experience and years of observation without collecting hard data suggests that this is true at least 51% of the time."

So they don't parse the same for me, though I can see them parsing the same for someone else.

The lungs serve as a filter for everything you breath in. Modern air is generally pretty polluted. I imagine that everyone's lungs get de facto pretty gunked up these days, like the filter on a home AC that never gets changed and then we wonder when other pieces of the system start showing strain.

I imagine it frequently goes unrecognized as starting in the lungs, but I think it probably does. Please note that "starting" there also doesn't preclude other contributing causes, which is another reason I object to the word primarily. Saying "First X happens and then there tends to be a cascade effect from there" absolutely isn't the same as saying "X happens and X is the entire cause of the problem with zero other factors contributing to it."

Edit: I will add that I believe it starts with the lungs in part because reading up on altitude sickness did wonders for my understanding of my condition which has substantial gut involvement. When there is a defect in air quality, it rapidly starts impacting other systems, like the gut, liver and kidneys, and there are huge knock on effects that can be outright deadly.

Before reading up on altitude sickness, I had this hand wavy idea that the gut and lung issues are related, but afterwards I had a clear and definable connection and that connection is how the body processes blood gasses. So, obviously, the connection is the circulatory system, which is powered by the heart.