Covid-19 outbreak in China

Abstract

The recent spread of Covid-19 has shown us how a virus can affect and permeate every social sphere. The exceptional nature of the event has forced healthcare professionals to act in the absence of consolidated guidelines and clinical-care practices recognized as such by the scientific community. At the same time, the high contagiousness of this virus has imposed on patients particularly restrictive and exhausting recovery from a psychological point of view. Many problems were also raised by the measures adopted to prevent the spread of the pathogen, which, in many cases, have impeded the victims' families to mourn according to the usual ritual forms. Among these different levels, new perceptions of danger are also determined, accompanied by moral judgments and phenomena of ethical stigmatization (the theme of the “plaugue spreader” that is who causes the spread of the infection). The objective of this study, through a careful analysis of events such as clinical triage, the lack of resources available to patients and hospitals, the choice of therapy and medicines, the prevention and management policies of the infection and the important question of access to health, is to understand how a pandemic can change the medical health institutions from the point of view of bioethics and medical anthropology. In this regard, the research questions will be: what were the criteria that have been followed in the Chinese hospitals to decide on which patients the few resources available could have been used? Have these criteria safeguarded, as far as possible, the care’s equity and the people’s dignity? Have Covid-19 patients had full access to healthcare? Has the bioethical question been debated in the public sphere? How were the hospitalizations of patients not affected by Covid-19 managed? And, in conclusion, were the psychological issues caused by the pandemic taken into consideration? If so, how?