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Should healthcare workers be prioritised during the COVID-19 pandemic? A view from Madrid and New York
  1. Diego Real de Asua1,2,
  2. Joseph J Fins2,3
  1. 1 Department of Internal Medicine, Hospital Universitario de la Princesa, Madrid, Spain
  2. 2 Division of Medical Ethics, Cornell University Joan and Sanford I Weill Medical College, New York, New York, USA
  3. 3 CASBI, Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury, Weill Cornell Medicine and Rockefeller University, New York, New York, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Diego Real de Asua, Internal Medicine, Hospital Universitario de la Princesa, 28006 Madrid, Spain; diego.realdeasua{at}gmail.com

Abstract

While COVID-19 has generated a massive burden of illness worldwide, healthcare workers (HCWs) have been disproportionately exposed to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection. During the so-called ‘first wave’, infection rates among this population group have ranged between 10% and 20%, raising as high as one in every four COVID-19 patients in Spain at the peak of the crisis. Now that many countries are already dealing with new waves of COVID-19 cases, a potential competition between HCW and non-HCW patients for scarce resources can still be a likely clinical scenario. In this paper, we address the question of whether HCW who become ill with COVID-19 should be prioritised in diagnostic, treatment or resource allocation protocols. We will evaluate some of the proposed arguments both in favour and against the prioritisation of HCW and also consider which clinical circumstances might warrant prioritising HCW and why could it be ethically appropriate to do so. We conclude that prioritising HCW’s access to protective equipment, diagnostic tests or even prophylactic or therapeutic drug regimes and vaccines might be ethically defensible. However, prioritising HCWs to receive intensive care unit (ICU) beds or ventilators is a much more nuanced decision, in which arguments such as instrumental value or reciprocity might not be enough, and economic and systemic values will need to be considered.

  • COVID-19
  • clinical ethics
  • resource allocation
  • health workforce

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There are no data in this work other than referenced results from previous papers

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Data availability statement

There are no data in this work other than referenced results from previous papers

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Footnotes

  • Contributors DRdA and JJF equally contributed to the original idea, literature research, writing and correction of the final version of this manuscript.

  • Funding DRdA is partially supported by the Fondo de Investigaciones Sanitarias (FIS grant PI19/00634, European Fund for Regional Development-EFRD) and the Foundation Jérôme Lejeune (grant no. 1777-2018).

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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