April 8, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic presents decision makers worldwide with unenviable policy choices. In many high-income countries, so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions—including lockdown and social distancing measures—have been implemented to buy time so that hospital intensive care unit (ICU) capacity can be rapidly built up to meet the anticipated rise in numbers of very sick patients. There will be major challenges in implementing equivalent measures in low-resource settings (LRS), where the sustainability of society-wide lockdown is questionable and intensive care bed capacity is generally limited to a few specialised centres in each country.