WASHINGTON (TNND) -- Five years after the world essentially shut down in response to the Coronavirus Pandemic, there is still a lot we don't know about COVID-19.

One looming question surrounds one of the initial forms of treatment given to those with the most severe cases of the virus.

In an interview with The National News Desk, Dr. Jordan Vaughn, President & Founder of the Microvascular Research Foundation, sounded alarm bells about the widespread use of ventilators on Covid patients."t

"It was pretty obvious in the spring and summer of 2020 that we weren't really dealing with a respiratory infection; it was actually a vascular disease of the lungs," he said." If you have a vascular issue of the lungs, the worst thing you can do is increase the intrathoracic pressure, which is what ventilation does. And in a sense is why most people who got on the ventilator did not live."

In the early months, several studies had similar findings.

One NIH study said it conducted it in the first place for this reason:

"While experience with COVID-19 continues to grow, reported mortality rates range from 50-97% in those requiring mechanical ventilation."

A Washington Post headline from April 2020 read, "In New York's largest hospital system, many coronavirus patients on ventilators didn't make it."

The article referred to a study published in JAMA.

"A total of 1,151 patients required mechanical ventilators. Of the 320 for whom final outcomes are known (either death or discharge), 88 percent died. That compares with about 80 percent of patients who died on ventilators before the pandemic, according to previous studies -- and with the death rate of about 50 percent that some critical-care doctors had optimistically hoped for when the first cases were diagnosed."

The use also soon led to a resurgence in Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia, or VAP, which dates back decades.

Another study concluded, "The presence of Covid-19 was associated with a longer duration of mechanical ventilation and a higher risk of death."

When asked about the notion that mechanical ventilators could have contributed to people dying," Dr. Vaughn said, "A hundred percent. Yeah. It was actually, if you think about the vessels. 358 If you already have vessels that don't work very well, what's the worst thing you can do to them? Actually blow more air in them, increase the intrathoracic pressure, and actually close down more vessels and actually make the oxygenation worse."

Still, other studies have shown that those with COVID-19 who were placed on ventilators compared with those on ventilators for other reasons had similar mortality rates.

Ventilators, after all, are usually reserved for those who are already very sick, so just how sick a person was when being placed on the ventilator may be the overriding factor.