Imagine that you come down with Covid-19 and seek medical help, but wind up in a hospital, a clinic, a hospital ship or even a tent with other sick people.
No one can easily breathe, and there aren’t enough ventilators to go around.
What are exhausted health care workers supposed to do?
With top experts predicting tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths in the U.S., it’s a question that must be addressed.
“Health care workers are dreading the prospect of such dire scenarios as U.S. hospitals brace for a looming surge in patients who need breathing machines and other resources that could soon be in critically short supply,” reports the Associated Press.
The toughest question for everybody is: who gets treated first?
“That has meant dusting off playbooks they’ve never before had to implement on how to fairly ration limited resources during an emergency,” the AP says.
Health officials nationwide are trying to figure out how to help as many people as possible, giving priority to those with the best chances of recovering.
And that makes it a question of medical ethics.
“The crushing emotional burden of carrying out potentially life-and-death decisions is why the guidelines typically designate separate triage teams to make the call, rather than leaving it to the doctors and nurses providing bedside care,” the AP says.
“This is a really terrifying decision — you don’t want any doctor or nurse to be alone with this decision,” Nancy Berlinger of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, told the news agency.
Another “wrenching decision,” the AP says, is one “many doctors in the U.S. likely have never faced — whether to take a patient off a machine to free it up for others.”
Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal wrote:
NYU Langone Health, one of the nation’s top academic medical centers, told emergency-room doctors that they have “sole discretion” to place patients on ventilators and institutional backing to “withhold futile intubations.”
Other countries are already making similar decisions.
In hard-hit northern Italy, one doctor compared how virus patients are being triaged to people waiting for an organ transplant.
”One heart and 10 people who are waiting for a heart transplant. Who gets the heart? The one who has the greatest chance of living better and longer with that heart,” said Dr. Luca Lorini of the Pope John XXIII hospital.
And right now, with new cases of Covid-19 skyrocketing in the U.S., fear is growing that American medical workers and hospitals will simply be overwhelmed.
