Yep, COVID-19 patients can have vary long respiratory failure episodes due to viral pneumonia. The longer you are on the vent the higher the chance of complications, same as any other condition that requires a ventilator. Note that only 190 of 585 patients in this study had COVID-19...the majority of them had some other condition requiring a ventilator to keep O2 levels up and got bad outcomes with “VAP” too.
https://www.jci.org/articles/view/170682
--- While it's not clear to what extent "standard therapy" for bacterial pneumonia could have reduced the purported COVID death rate, "sending patients home to do nothing – no corticosteroids, no antibiotics just in case it was bacterial – drove the COVID-19 death rate up far higher than it had to be," Lyons-Weiler wrote.
--- He attributed the "do nothing" approach to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who spread alarm in spring 2020 that the U.S. didn't have enough ventilators to treat a predicted wave of life-threatening infections.
--- The Northwestern paper cites Fauci's 2008 paper on the "unexpectedly important" role of secondary bacterial infection in viral pneumonia deaths, based on autopsy samples from the 1918 influenza pandemic.
--- When asked about "treatment mistakes" early in the pandemic at a 2022 lecture at which Fauci received an award for "significant contributions to medicine," he conceded that "we very, very readily would put people on mechanical ventilation" but did not say it was a mistake.
--- They learned "through clinical experience it might've been better just to make sure we position [COVID patients] properly in the prone or supine position," he said. Intubating "so readily … might've actually caused more harm than good."
I read the 2008 paper. It shed light on much.
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