By Kathleen Liddell, Jeffrey M. Skopek, Stephanie Palmer, Stevie Martin, Jennifer Anderson and Andrew Sagar. When Covid-19 patients reach the point of critical illness where ventilation is necessary, they tend to deteriorate quickly. They will die if they do not receive ventilation very soon. But ventilation is not a cure – it gives the patient’s […]
Month: April 2020
‘Your country needs you’: The ethics of allocating staff to high-risk clinical roles in the management of patients with COVID-19
By Michael Dunn, Mark Sheehan, Joshua Horden, Helen Turnham and Dominic Wilkinson. As the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on health service delivery, health providers are modifying care pathways and staffing models in ways that require health professionals to be reallocated to work in critical care settings. Many of the roles to which staff are being allocated […]
Rewarding through prioritization: The limits of reciprocal obligation in allocating scarce medical resources in the COVID-19 crisis
By Thibaud Haaser In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems are under severe strain. Some countries are currently experiencing, or may experience within a few weeks, shortages of medical resources (in particular intensive care beds and mechanical ventilation). In this context, the health community may have to make impossible choices regarding the allocation […]
COVID-19 and vaccine ethics: pre-empting conscientious objection
By Helen Watt The race is on to produce a COVID-19 vaccine: teams are working hard and fast across the world. We all long to see a vaccine in record time – but must, of course, have an eye to ethics too. Debates on vaccine ethics tend to focus on risks, whether to participants in […]
The COVID19 pandemic and ethics through the eyes of women
By Pauline Capdevielle, Amaranta Manrique de Lara, María de Jesús Medina Arellano This year’s International Women’s Day was a historic occurrence in Mexico. Tens of thousands of women took to the streets on the eighth and then chose to vanish on the ninth. Each day in its own way, the so-called 8M and 9M were […]
ICU triage: How many lives or whose lives?
By Angela Ballantyne Bioethicists around the world have been asked to advise on the goals and methods of triage protocols. Estimates suggest 5% of COVID19 cases will require ICU care. The key ethical tension is between utility and equity. There are other relevant principles of fair allocation such as reciprocity for frontline workers who have […]
Public Health Law in times of COVID-19 : perspective from India
About two months after the WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, India dived into a 21 day lockdown. For the general public, daily life came to a halt ; but for our health care workers, it was time to suit up for the battle. With the responsibility of the health of 1.3 billion Indians […]
The forgotten first line: response to COVID-19 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo
This blog is a part of #COVID19Africa Series. Click for French version The first line of care, the front line, is the patients’ first point of contact, the coordinator of care, the interface between the community and the health system, and is responsible for the health of a specific population. In much of sub-Sahara Africa and […]
COVID-19 puts the health system to test in Bababé, Mauritania
This blog is a part of #COVID19Africa Series. Click for French version Mauritania reported the first cases of COVID-19 on 13 March 2020. To date, the country has 6 confirmed cases: 4 imported cases from Europe, 1 case of community transmission in the capital Nouakchott, 1 imported case from Senegal in Kaédi, a town in Southern […]
First line response to COVID-19: community health centres and doctors’ offices in Guinea
This blog is a part of #COVID19Africa Series. Click for French version Guinea’s health sector is primarily public. The first line of healthcare consists of more than 410 public health facilities, some 100 private non-profit facilities, and many private for-profit doctors’ offices. Even before the first COVID-19 case was reported in Guinea on 12 March […]