We believe that the basic criteria for a system for triage to critical care in a pandemic are fourfold; it should identify patients sick enough to require higher level care at some stage in their illness, it should be able to recognise those patients who are too acutely or chronically unwell to benefit from critical care, it should be consistently applicable by healthcare professionals and support workers from a variety of backgrounds within the constraints of the pandemic and should ideally also be scalable to reflect any mismatch between need and capacity. In order to fairly allocate resources across both flu and non-flu patients it should also be disease non-specific and allow prognostic comparisons across disease categories.