If the hospitals get overcrowded, who gets care and who does not?
These decisions, known as ethical triage, have been only in the realm of academic ethics classes and speculation before now. But the realities of the Covid-19 emergency - especially in places like New York - mean that some doctors and nurses may have to make the life saving, and treatment denial decisions sometime soon. As the article says, "No one who participates on a triage team emerges undamaged."
Here's the link, its about a 10 minute read.
https://undark.org/2020/03/29/…19-shortages-health-care/
We would not be in this place if our “wizards of smart” - the ones that want us to trust them with everything had done their job after the Last pandemics. That’s a fact.
Deciding who is most “valuable” is a slippery slope. As a fact we now know the youngest and oldest are expendable in our present society. The “productive” or shall we say , the batteries for the machine will do just fine.
Aldous Huxley nailed it. We are here.
Elsewhere, Douglas White of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues have developed a rating system that assigns patients priority scores based on who is most likely to benefit. The goal is to help triage teams decide how to allocate resources based on broad ethical principles. For instance, if the framework scores three patients as equally likely to benefit from a ventilator, but one of the patients is much younger than the rest, age may be the tiebreaker. “That’s not because the younger person has any more intrinsic worth or social value, but because they’re the worst-off in the sense that they’ve had the least opportunity to live through life,” White said.
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