The Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has generated a lot of storm in the social media — much of it being misinformation or propaganda. Mainstream scientists and public officials have summarily dismissed them as fake or as conspiracy theories. But it is fear of the pandemic at the root of this widespread misinformation. And behind […]
Month: June 2020
Herd immunity and lifting lockdowns: a new trolley problem?
By Ezio Di Nucci How does pursuing herd immunity compare with lifting lockdowns, from an ethical point of view? The (moral) problem with the pursuit of herd immunity under a pandemic such as COVID-19 is that getting more than half of the population infected (the herd immunity threshold is at least 60%), given a CFR […]
Death during COVID-19: Redefining terminal illness
By Samantha W. Stein and Justin T. Clapp IDENTIFYING A GAP IN TRIAGE MODELS As floodwaters rose and resources dwindled inside Memorial Medical Center in the days following Hurricane Katrina, patient Emmett Everett pleaded with nurses: “Don’t let them leave me behind.” Everett sought to be evacuated to the safety of another hospital alongside nearly […]
Supra-institutional transparency: a first step towards recovering from the COVID-19 wound
By Benjamin Herreros, Pablo Gella, Diego Real de Asúa In the wake of the first COVID-19 wave, the latest news media cycles in Spain have been filled with alarming headlines on the need to investigate the triage criteria used during the epidemic. The State’s Attorney’s Office is undertaking preliminary investigations into several hospitals in the […]
Why praising healthcare workers as ‘heroic’ is not the best way to support them
By Caitríona Cox. “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy” – F. Scott Fitzgerald In recent weeks praise for ‘Healthcare Heroes’ has been plentiful in the media, with The Mirror even launching a campaign for all healthcare workers to receive a medal for their work. The weekly ‘Clap for Carers’ in the […]
Is it wrong to prioritise patients who have the highest chance of survival during Covid-19?
Alaa Daoud and Ezio Di Nucci. Wilkinson proposed that health systems should aim to prioritise patients who have the highest chance of survival, based on Taurek’s ‘lifeboat’ experiment, where the general public chose to save five patients instead of one patient. This is no more or less true of saying that the current approaches are […]
Accepting trust for pandemic response: we need leaders to think twice
By Samia Hurst. Many pandemic response measures, from physical distancing to confinement, rely on cooperation by members of the public for their implementation and effectiveness. In requiring such cooperation, these measures all rely on the public investing sufficient trust in scientific and/or political authorities to follow instructions and recommendations. Trust in medical and political authorities […]
Lessons from Lockdown
Lessons from LockdownI have to self-isolate “shielding” because I am on high dose steroids to control temporal, hopefully it will also be temporary, arteritis. After a life of frenetic activity, it was a shock to realise that an imposed physical slowdown also allowed a mental slowdown, allowing for an “on the thought” time for reflection […]
The Doctor will not Touch You – clinical medicine at a juncture(Abhijit Das)
We are currently going through a cataclysmic event in modern history. The SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has struck with an unprecedented global scale and ferocity: within a span of 6 months, the virus has infected more than 6 million people and continues to spread unabated around the world. This extraordinary pandemic has brought in one definitive paradigm […]
Scaling Up Capacity for COVID-19 Testing in the Philippines
Four months since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the Philippines, the number of cases has risen into the thousands. Testing capacity has expanded rapidly, but testing continues to limit the Philippines response. The Philippines has adopted a “whole of government, whole of society” approach to address this global pandemic, grouped around four […]