The treatment effect in Van den Berghe's study was limited to patients who stayed in Intensive Care for five days or longer, but all ventilated patients were admitted to the study at the time of ICU admission. Identifying patients who will stay in the ICU for five days or longer is problematic whereas it is relatively easy to identify patients, particularly patients admitted for routine post-operative monitoring, who will be discharged alive from the ICU after the day following admission. For that reason we propose to consider all patients but exclude those expected to be discharged alive or dead before the end of the day following admission.