evidence: Early reports from China, the United Kingdom and Seattle found mortality rates as high as 90% among patients on ventilators. And more recently, a study of some New York hospitals seemed to show a mortality rate of 88%. [...] That's only a bit higher than the death rate for patients placed on ventilators with severe lung infections unrelated to the coronavirus. [...] The mortality rate among 165 COVID-19 patients placed on a ventilator at Emory was just under 30%. And unlike the New York study, only a few patients were still on a ventilator when the data were collected.