THE HUMAN DIGNITY OF THE ELDERLY IN COPING WITH COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The work demonstrated the fragility and difficulties of the elderly in achieving treatment against the coronavirus in Public Health Units. hospitals, forcing him to take extreme and morally difficult decisions and measures, especially to which patients would be allocated to ICU beds, hurting the dignity of the human person of the elderly, especially when it put into effect the AMIB Protocol for allocation of resources in depletion during the pandemic caused by COVID-19, establishing evaluative criteria, imposing a specific reserve of ICUs for the elderly and limiting the priority of care for them. It showed that the life expectancy of the elderly cannot be considered as an evaluative "criterion" and included the technical decisions of the public authorities in the actions taken to treat the infected elderly. In this aspect, the State's limitations to confront COVID-19 were observed, making it necessary to discuss the topic, which permeates between law and ethics. Basic and descriptive research was used, as no definitive solutions were pointed out, only the description of the facts. The study was carried out by qualitative research without blemishing the quantitative data and the hypothetical deductive method allowed us to investigate the information from a rational point of view of the issue, thus leading to the hypotheses for solving the problem.