COVID-19 Articles & Resources

Articles

What Warrants Religious Exemption from Covid Vaccine Mandates?

Anecdotally and from news reports, it seems that religion has been undergoing a revival in recent weeks. Faced with mandatory vaccination against Covid-19, students and employees, notoriously including health care workers, have appealed to religion as grounds for exemption.

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A COVID Serenity Prayer

We need the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

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PODCAST: Covid Ethics Series

Presented by Seton Hall University's Interprofessional Health Sciences Library. The COVID Ethics Series relies on the idea that challenging ethical issues are best addressed by many folks, from diverse backgrounds, practically reasoning together. Each week Professor Bryan Pilkington is joined by a panel of leading experts from medicine, nursing, and the health sciences, as well as political theorists, economists, ethicists, philosophers and lawyers for a conversation about ethical issues which have arisen or intensified due to the pandemic. The COVID Ethics Series is generously co-sponsored by IHS Student Life and IHS Library.

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Should Covid Vaccination Status Be Used to Make Triage Decisions?

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to strain health systems’ capacity to provide adequate care for critically ill patients, should patients’ vaccination status be considered in making triage decisions? This question sparked debate recently after the leak of an internal memo of the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guideline Task Force, which provides triage guidelines for regional hospitals, that proposed using patients’ Covid-19 vaccination status as a factor to assign intensive care beds. The task force has since clarified that it was not intended as policy but for internal discussion between the task force and physician representatives of the regional hospitals.

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Would It Be Fair to Treat Vaccinated Covid Patients First?

Last week, Texas health care policymakers discussed taking vaccination status into account for Covid triage. It’s a larger conversation ethicists are bracing for.

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Quality of Life? Suffering? Covid-19 Intensifies Challenges in Discussing Life-Sustaining Treatment (The Hastings Center)

The Covid-19 pandemic has stretched health care resources to the breaking point, particularly the mechanical and human resources essential to intensive care. Although Covid-19 continues to inflict utter havoc and compound pre-existing poverty, inequality, and disparities in much of the world, in many areas of the United States we find ourselves slowly recovering from a relatively unprecedented resource nadir, cautiously re-approaching a tentative sense of normalcy with respect to health care operations.

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The Death of Empathy

COVID denial, anti-masking, and vaccine refusal entered our world, and everything changed.

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Healthcare Worker Burnout Trending in an Alarming Direction

In 2021, the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated healthcare worker burnout and the prospects for next year are bleak unless C-suite executives act.

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