Some Ethical Questions Surrounding COVID
Should hospitals turn away unvaccinated COVID patients? Should hotels kick COVID patients out? Should everyone be vaccinated and masked?
Last night we reported the story of an Iowa man who lives in a rural community served by a small hospital. He became sick and went to that hospital.
According to his family the hospital told him he needed specialized care at another, larger medical center. But according to the family he had to wait 15 days for a bed because the second hospital was overrun with COVID patients, the bulk of them unvaccinated. They say by the time he got in it was too late and he died.
The De Moines Register reports more than 84% of COVID-19 patients requiring intensive care in Iowa are not fully vaccinated against the disease.
The case prompts the first of three ethical questions surrounding COVID-19. Should hospitals refuse treatment for unvaccinated COVID patients so they don’t have to turn away other patients because of capacity issues?
It’s a hypothetical because hospitals, by law, can’t turn a patient away from an emergency room.
My second ethical question surrounding COVID has to do with hotels. I’m aware of the case of a family from Argentina visiting New York City. As they were preparing to return home they got COVID tested. Every member of the family is COVID positive. So they can’t fly until they complete their isolation period. But what began as an inconvenience turned into a nightmare. Because when they told the hotel they needed to extend their stay - and why - they were told they had to leave. This even though New York City has a hotel COVID isolation program.
I don’t know what recourse the family potentially had through the city but after a day’s worth of frantically calling around, they were able to get alternative accommodations. But what if they hadn’t? And what about cities that don’t have hotel isolation programs?
So my second question is, should hotels be permitted to deny rooms to COVID positive guests?
My third ethical question directly affects all of us. Do we have an ethical responsibility to vaccinate and wear masks in public? This is not a political question I’m asking - I know there’s resistance to government mandates and I’m not entering that debate. I just ran a couple errands and in both stores I went into masking is encouraged but optional. About half the people were wearing masks. In order to make everyone around us feel more comfortable and given the scientific guidance on masks, should we all have been wearing ours?
Santa Clara University senior ethics fellow Margaret R. McLean says the answer to my third question is obvious.
“Sometimes, especially when the right thing to do is inconvenient or unpleasant, we need a nudge or, in this case, a shove to do the right thing,” she has written. “Wouldn’t you save a life if you could? You can—vaccines and masks are superpowers that literally save lives.”
“Wouldn’t you save a life if you could?” When one puts it this way, perhaps there is no debate about the third question at all.
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Some Ethical Questions Surrounding COVID
half the people getting the virus are vaccinated they are out to lunch on this this germ warfare not a virus created by nature