According to the Texas Department of Health, there are only 321 ICU beds left open for the 30 million people in the state.
www.cbsnews.com
Get vaccinated.
We will soon see increase in deaths beyond proportion of covid thanks to these overruns. We saw it in El Paso last year. We will now see it multiple areas of the state this year.
Pandemic ethics question: now that I have no ventilators and the same is starting to happen across the state, If two patients need a ventilator and one is vaccinated and one is unvaccinated, is it ethical to use vaccination status to prioritize access to ventilators?
Of course those against the vaccine will think this is an abhorrent question. Ethics questions are often tough. If I have to consider prioritizing the president, a nurse, etc over my mother, then this is a reasonable topic to consider.
Vaccinated patients get hospitalized less, go on the ventilator less, and spend less time in the hospital and on the ventilator than the unvaccinated If they get there.
From a purely resource allocation standpoint during overruns, you could save a vaccinated patient's life on average with less ventilator time and system resources than the unvaccinated.
Other decisions in pandemic ethics such as prioritizing the president over the average citizen but not prioritizing an important person's wife over the average citizen speak to the deterrent and morale problems in allocating resources. If it is ethical to prioritize frontline workers to maintain the system and to encourage continued risk taking for the system to hold together, is it the same to hold that incentive out for the populace to perform an action (vaccination) that further holds the system together?
www.mississippifreepress.org
