Washington D.C., Mar 24, 2020 / 02:30 pm (CNA).- In Italy, which has the most deaths from coronavirus, some doctors have said they have had to overlook older patients to focus on younger ones who are more likely to survive as the virus overwhelmed the healthcare system.
In the US, states and hospitals are considering how to distribute healthcare if demand for limited resources exceeds what can be provided. Worldwide, there are 332,930 confirmed cases of Covid-19, and 14,509 deaths. Of those, 31,573 cases are in the US, where there have been 402 deaths due to the virus.
Colorado adopted a Crisis Standards of Care Plan in 2018 as guidelines “to assist healthcare providers in their decision making with the intention of maximizing patient survival and minimizing the adverse outcomes that might occur” when healthcare needs “far surpass” what is available.
“It’s very military-style triage,” Dr. Matthew Wynia of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus told The Colorado Sun’s John Ingold. “If we get hit that hard, we are going to have some very difficult decisions to make. And we can’t wait until then to get ready for that … it would be irresponsible not to plan right now for a huge surge of patients.”
Colorado’s crisis standards of care would be activated only after the governor declares a public health emergency, and even then, it would implemented locally, depending on the conditions in individual counties or communities.
Among the goals of the state plan is to “minimize serious illness and death by administering a finite pool of resources to those who have the greatest opportunity to benefit from them”.
Guiding ethical elements of Colorado’s plan are stewardship of resources, duty to care, soundness, fairness, reciprocity, proportionality, transparency, and accountability.
It focuses especially on fairness, proportionality, solidarity, and being participatory.
The Colorado guidelines say healthcare providers should be fair to all the affected “without regard to factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability or region that are not medically relevant.”
With regard to solidarity, the Crisis Standards of Care Plan says that “all people should consider the greater good of the entire community.” It adds that for transparency and accountability, “the community, healthcare providers, and emergency management agencies” should be engaged during the process.
Dr. Charlie Camosy, an associate professor of theology at Fordham University, last week discussed with CNA the principles that should be used as doctors might face choices over healthcare distribution.
“There are virtually no universally agreed-upon principles to do this–excepting, perhaps, the idea that health care providers, first-responders, law enforcement, and others primarily responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the polity should get priority,” he stated.
For Catholics, he said that serving “the most vulnerable first” is a fundamental principal.
“Those people are Christ to us in a special way and we will be judged according to how we treat them. We don’t think about, say, how long they might stay on a ventilator vs. how long someone we might encounter next week might stay on a ventilator. We also don’t think about how long they might have to live if the treatment is successful vs. how long other someone we might encounter next week might live if their treatment is successful.”
He added that it makes sense among limited resources “to treat those first who are most likely to benefit from the treatment. And there may be a disproportionate number of younger people in the former category. But that is not the same as deciding that we ought to prefer the young to the old because they have longer to live.”
While the US bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services do not directly address resource allocation during crises, they do note that “Catholic health care should distinguish itself by service to and advocacy for those people whose social condition puts them at the margins of our society and makes them particularly vulnerable to discrimination: the poor; the uninsured and the underinsured; children and the unborn; single parents; the elderly; those with incurable diseases and chemical dependencies; racial minorities; immigrants and refugees.”
The directives add that “in particular, the person with mental or physical disabilities, regardless of the cause or severity, must be treated as a unique person of incomparable worth, with the same right to life and to adequate health care as all other persons.”
In Washington, advocates of persons with disabilities have filed a complaint saying that crisis care guidelines issued by the state health department are improperly discriminatory.
“There’s been a long history of people with intellectual, development mental disabilities having our medical care denied,” Ivanova Smith, one of the complainants, told NPR. “Because we’re not seen as valuable. We’re not seen as productive or needed. When that’s not true. We have people that love us and that care for us. Many people with disabilities work and they do amazing things in their communities but they need that life saving care.”
Attorneys representing the Thomas More Society and the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund published a memo March 23 urging that “policies rationing care on the basis of disability or age … would violate federal law regarding invidious discrimination.”
“Anticipated longevity or quality of life are inappropriate issues for consideration. Decisions must be made solely on clinical factors as to which patients have the greatest need and the best prospect of a good medical outcome. Therefore, disability and age should not be used as categorical exclusions in making these critical decisions,” the memo concludes.
Peter Breen, vice president of the Thomas More Society, commented that “The horrific idea of withholding care from someone because they are elderly or disabled, is untenable and represents a giant step in the devaluation of each and every human life in America.”
Other possible criteria for healthcare distribution during crises include first-come-first-served, or a lottery system.
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OCP’s cover art is usually lame, but that’s the least of their problems.
Should have used fr Martin or Sr semone.. OCP, the wagon wheel disaster for popcorn cafeteria catholicism..
Why apologise for a made up being by a delusional conman like Smith? A cult if there ever was one.
Me thinkest that thou hast misread the article. The apology is made to the Catholic readership BECAUSE of the reasons you state.
But, now that we’re on the subject, it’s fascinating how two very similar religious “types” diverge poles apart from the historically real Incarnation…Mormonism denies the possibility of miracles (all existence is only natural, anthropomorphic, and evolutionary, even God!), while Islam holds that all existence comes miraculously from a totally inscrutable Allah (to affirm even secondary “laws of nature” is to admit an autonomy outside of the only autonomy who is God—and this assertion is blasphemy!).
But, on so many other counts cultic Mormonism and Islam are almost replicas of each other…and almost inevitable to the human imagination—in the absence of Christian witness to the historical Incarnation of Jesus Christ as fully human and fully divine, not a hybrid but both natures fully in one Person. Now, about the similarities:
“Islam attributes a restored text—the Qur’an—to messages received by Mohammed directly from the Angel Gabriel beginning in 610 A.D. The founding prophet of Mormonism is believed to have been visited by the Angel Moroni, instead, beginning in 1823. The prophet Joseph Smith carries an exactly transcribed and untouchable text delivered on hidden tablets of gold. Islam’s untouchable Arabic script (Q 13:37, 42:5, 46:13) is duplicated for Mohammed from an identical text in heaven. Both religions (and many others) have a supplemental set of writings, respectively the Book of Mormon and the Muslim Hadith. Both religious leaders experienced initial persecution, the mystic Joseph Smith in Missouri and Illinois and Mohammed at Mecca. Both migrated to a selected new base of operations, Joseph Smith west to Salt Lake and Mohammed north to Medina. Islam is preached first to the tribes of Arabia, while Mormonism initially saw its mission among the indigenous tribes of North America. Mormons have believed that the American Indians are migrant descendants from the Israelite patriarch Lehi arriving via Arabia to the New World in 590. B.C., but do not reject possibly Asiatic origins [….] Mormonism, like Islam, claims to be a restoration rather than a new religion, and claims an option for ongoing revelation. Mormonism would restore a corrupted Christianity while Islam would restore the earlier and corrupted faith of Abraham [Israelite worship of the Golden Calf, and Christian “polytheism” of the Triune One] from the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian narrative. Mormon apologists refer to a universal apostasy by a Church extinguished under Diocletian and ravaged by later strife among Protestants. Islam is scandalized by early Byzantine Christian theological disputes of about the same period” (extract from Beaulieu, “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity,” University Press of America, 2012, Chapter 2).
SUMMARY: Probably not a bad idea to apologize for witlessly using the image of Moroni on the cover of a Catholic publication.