If we don’t take coronavirus seriously, expect hard choices at Children’s Mercy and beyond
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If our efforts to stop the invader have not worked, we will have to make tough choices. Patients who are unlikely to be saved will be allowed to die. Good palliative care can control pain and suffering and make deaths more peaceful.
These decisions will be emotionally painful and ethically troubling. The proposed guidelines suggest that they not be left to doctors at the bedside. Instead, they are to be made by triage committees following strict protocols. Let’s be clear: These committees are not “death panels.” Their goal is to use our scarce ICU resources to save as many lives as possible when not all lives can be saved.
It may still be possible to avoid pandemic ethics. We all need to persist with and intensify our lockdowns and closures to prevent the spread of the virus and decrease the anticipated strain on hospitals.
But we still may need to face the next collective challenges: supporting the difficult work that clinicians will have to do if the resources are not there to provide all the care that patients need. No doctor ever wants to let a patient die from lack of resources. But such decisions may be necessary. To get through this, we need an informed public standing in solidarity with a prepared health care system.
We can do this together. We can only do this together.
John D. Lantos is director of the Bioethics Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City.
