In situations with limited medical resources, be they personnel,
equipment, or time (and it always boils down to a lack of time),
clinicians use “triage” to determine which patients receive
treatment. What type of treatment a patient receives depends on the
triage “lottery” rules in place. Although these rules for
sorting patients and distributing resources are standardized for most
situations, they must be somewhat altered after overwhelming,
nonstandard (i.e., biological, chemical, and radiological)
disasters.