How long can you live on a ventilator, generally speaking, the ventilator is divided into invasive ventilator and non-invasive ventilator, if for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease type II respiratory failure patients, will be long-term application of non-invasive ventilator for assisted ventilation treatment. This kind of patients usually pay better attention, do not have repeated colds, do not have repeated lung infections, generally speaking, the survival time is longer, there are more than ten years, 20 years of patients can survive. If the patient is treated with invasive ventilator-assisted ventilation, the disease is generally more serious. If there is severe pneumonia, but this kind of pneumonia is not caused by drug-resistant bacterial infection, that is to say, it is more sensitive to the drugs, after treatment, the invasive ventilator can be removed, and the prognosis of this kind of patients is better. If the cause of intubation, such as tracheal invasive ventilator can not be removed, is a drug-resistant bacterial infection and other issues, the prognosis of such patients is not good, and can even be life-threatening.