ABSTRACT
Despite all that has been written and said about the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a surprising dearth of ethical analyses of the hospital visitation restrictions that were introduced in response to the COVID-19 virus. These visitation restrictions have been a curious mix of gospel and controversy. This paper briefly sketches five relevant public health values: effectiveness, proportionality, necessity, least infringement and public justification. It then analyzes whether the COVID-19 visitation restrictions served those values. Although the visitation policies may have served some public health values, they appear to have failed others, casting doubt on whether they are ethically supported according to a public health ethics framework.
ABSTRACT
I had been on the phone with Madeleine's mother for fifteen minutes, and she had sobbed throughout. She pleaded with me, "You won't even let our family visit her together. If you really want to help my daughter, you will let us stay with her." Madeleine, who was twenty-four years old, was dying of end-stage acute myeloid leukemia and was intubated in one of our intensive care units. Her intensivist had requested a clinical ethics consultation for potentially inappropriate medical treatment-in my world of clinical ethics consultation, routine stuff. Except that, in March 2020, nothing was routine anymore. The Covid-19 pandemic calls for creative thinking about ad hoc and post hoc bereavement efforts, and it may result in efforts to revise existing accounts of what constitutes a good death in order to accommodate patients' and families' experiences at the end of life during a pandemic.