Hannibal 2 wrote:What about mouth tapers with nasal masks?
Most people wake up when it happens or they rip the mask off, force their mouth open, etc.
What we don't know is how many "died quietly in their sleep," because they never post here after death.
If the power comes back on, nobody might realize the power was off. A coroner is probably not going to do an extensive investigation for some "poor sick geezer on a breathing machine who died quietly in his sleep" if there's no evidence of foul play. I'm not sure how you'd distinguish that kind of suffocation from natural death anyway. People tend to lose consciousness with little fuss and die when O2 concentration is low.
Heck, even the Chief Justice of the US supreme court wasn't autopsied when he died apparently not wearing his CPAP machine.