By Udo Schuklenk. Even a cursory look at the news tells us that many doctors and nurses are reluctant to provide care to COVID-19 patients. Personal protective equipment (PPE) levels in Australia’s state of Queensland are very low, writes the state’s Clinical Senate Chair Alex Markwell. Bulgaria has seen a wave of doctors resigning, Zimbabwean […]
Latest articles
Your family or your job? Balancing the duty to treat with the duty to family in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
By Doug McConnell At an aged-care home in Australia, most of the social care workers abstained from work after a COVID-19 outbreak at the facility. They cited concern for their family members, some of whom were immunocompromised. Physicians and nurses in the UK have threatened to quit because a lack of adequate personal protective equipment […]
Personal Protective Equipment for front-line health workers: an ethical imperative
By Elizabeth Fenton Covid-19 poses risks to health care workers that exceed those posed to members of the public. Repeated exposure to infected patients increases their risk of infection, and might also make their symptoms more severe if they become infected. Although reported numbers vary, in Italy approximately 9% of COVID-19 cases are health workers, […]
Allocating scarce biospecimens
By Leah Pierson, Sophia Gibert, and Joseph Millum Clinical researchers frequently collect samples of blood, skin, and other bodily tissues from their patient-participants and have samples left over when their research is complete. These biospecimens are often in high demand from other scientists who want them for their own research. How should such collections of […]
What can contraceptive justice teach us about coronavirus?
By Arianne Shahvisi A disease sweeps through the population, and is transmitted between people through ordinary social interaction. One group of people are particularly vulnerable, and infection has very serious consequences for them. Another group is able to transmit the disease, but has little risk of being harmed by it. Measures can be taken by […]
Scarce resources allocation in the COVID-19 outbreak: Extraordinary framework, ordinary criteria
By Chiara Mannelli. After initially emerging in China, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has advanced rapidly. The World Health Organization has declared it a pandemic, with Europe becoming its new epicenter. Demand for critical care currently exceeds its supply, raising significant ethical concerns, among which is the allocation of scarce resources. Professionals are considering the prioritization […]
Highest German court defends the constitutional right to (assisted) suicide
By Ruth Horn. On 26th April 2020, the German Constitutional Court overturned a law of 2015 prohibiting ‘any business-like assisted suicide’. This included any potentially recurring suicide assistance that might be provided, with or without commercial interests, by a doctor, nurse, relative or member of a right-to-die organisation. Although suicide and therefore also assisted suicide […]
The Slow Dragon and the Dim Sloth: What can the world learn from coronavirus responses in Italy and the UK?
By Marcello Ienca and David Shaw. Italy and the UK arguably represent the two extremes of initial policy responses to the ongoing Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. In the following we provide an overview of these response strategies and discuss what the rest of the world can learn from these two countries. Chaotically draconian: The Italian […]
Don’t let the ethics of despair infect the intensive care unit
By David Shaw, Dan Harvey and Dale Gardiner. Coronavirus is a killer, and most countries have implemented measures to reduce this mortality. On the one hand, public health measures aim to limit the spread of the disease, and hence limit the number of people requiring hospitalisation; on the other, healthcare professionals working in intensive care […]
COVID-19 and the moral community: A nursing ethics perspective
By Georgina Morley. Effective triage and allocation of resources based on clinically and ethically supportable criteria is undoubtedly the correct way to respond to COVID-19 as we aim to mitigate the effects and likely unprecedented impact this novel virus will have on healthcare systems across the globe. However, as some commentators have overlooked, the burden […]