Ethics and Covid-19

For this, I wanted to discuss ethics and how our understanding of ethics has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In any pandemic who do we decide to save when there are not enough resources? How do we allocate medicine and vaccines? These are just a few of the questions that come up and it puts medical professionals in a tough situation. In this situation, they may literally have to decide who lives and who dies. In the future, I hope to go into the medical field, and the thought of dealing with a pandemic scares me, but I know that I will have to. This is due to the increasing prevalence of zoonotic virus because of human population growth, development of land for human use, and climate change. I wanted to specifically look at an article written during the pandemic to learn what others think of these ethical questions.

When Rosenbaum explains who people would want to save, she says that people first wanted to save the people with the greatest chance of short term survival and then those who have the greatest chance of long term survival. They also indicated that age should not be the only factor to consider but stage of life may need to be considered. Also deciding based on the perceived quality of life after covid-19 may be difficult because there is no actual way to decide this. Would you save a healthy older individual that may die otherwise or a younger individual with a preexisting condition? We don’t know the quality of life they may have after COVID-19 or how long they may live so it makes this question almost impossible to answer. The author suggested some sort of algorithm to decide based on how long one normally recovers among other factors and I agree that this would be a fair way to approach this problem.

Beyond these ethical dilemmas that those in medicine would have to deal with, the pandemic showed me the importance of well-funded scientific research even if it seems like a waste of money to some. People had to learn the hard way that science is not a magic process that works instantaneously, it requires time and a wealth of former research. I have hope for the future now that we have a new administration in the white house that is willing to trust science and fund it.

For an area of future study, it would be interesting to see specifically how the pandemic has impacted medical professionals. Have any physiological or psychological changes occurred? What was the impact of the stress on these medical professionals and how can we better provide for them to mitigate this stress during a future pandemic without compromising the care of patients?

Rosenbaum, L. (2020). Facing Covid-19 in Italy—ethics, logistics, and therapeutics on the epidemic’s front line. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(20), 1873-1875.