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Overview of ethical principles
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Health is a human right anchored in values as a basic necessity of life. It promotes the well-being of persons, communities, economic prosperity, and national development. The coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caught the world unaware and unprepared. It presented a huge challenge to the health and economic systems of every country. Acros...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... The field of public health ethics discusses different normative principles to guide good public health actions. [47] These principles are of particular importance to the current pandemic [46] and are summarized in Table 1. [48,49] Unfortunately, the global demand for SARS-COVID-19 vaccines has already outstripped supply as many countries in the global north have placed orders. ...Similar publications
Introduction. The Advanced Directives Document (ADD) is an efficient tool to plan for future medical care in case of a potential loss of autonomy. Ethical dilemmas arise in end-of-life care, including the principle of respect for autonomy and potential beneficence involved in health care, leading to moral distress of practitioners. Objective. To id...
Citations
... As a result, everything was new and people did not know what to do. Governments too were not ready for a global pandemic and very few had an idea of what to do and even these few were not certain (Aliyu, 2021). Guidelines were given asking people to wear masks, wash hand, sanitize often, and keep social distance (Desai & Aronoff, 2020). ...
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 led to a global crisis of unprecedented scale and complexity that disrupted almost every aspect of human life. The pandemic has taken people, institutions and governments by surprise, so the impact of the virus has been profound and far-reaching. The rapid and relentless spread of the pandemic has challenged global health systems, strained economies, altered daily routines in educational settings and at work, and tested the resilience of communities worldwide. Different studies have identified vulnerabilities in the world’s ability to respond to health emergencies at the individual and societal levels. This study presents a systematic literature review and theoretical analysis of the disruptions caused by COVID-19 to help formulate strategies that encourage flexibility and resilience in the face of such complex and interconnected disruptions. The article analyzes the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic through the prism of two main theories: the theory of situational crisis communications (type of crisis, its history, responsibility, perceived seriousness, predictable probability, crisis communications strategies, post-crisis reputation), as well as the theory of social learning (learning through observation, modeling and imitation, positive and negative reinforcement in the formation of behavior). In addition, the nature of society’s adaptation to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic is also considered through the prism of the theory of subversive innovations (progress in communication technologies, new methods of remote work and education, the entry of social networks into the business world, the introduction of asynchronous communication). The article summarizes the scientific progress on the following main consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the workplace, healthcare system, and education. The study provides recommendations on the steps that individuals, institutions and governments can take to increase readiness and ability to adapt to the next crisis (interdisciplinary cooperation, analysis of communication strategies, system analysis). The analysis conducted in the article also made it possible to outline the most promising directions for further qualitative intervention studies (in-depth case studies taking into account the specific context of regions, organizations or communities to identify effective and ineffective policies and practices; qualitative interviews with key stakeholders to understand the intricacies of decision-making in the context of the pandemic crisis); qualitative action studies (building community resilience, collaborative research efforts involving policymakers, health experts and community representatives to develop crisis response policies jointly) and quantitative studies (analysis of pandemic spread, impact of vaccination on disease control, analysis of the economic effects of the pandemic, etc.).
... 11 Further, ethics is an integral part of practicing medicine and as students are exposed to various principles of ethics in their training, they can implement similar principles during pandemics to streamline the task of efficient and equitable allocation of available resources, triage, and patient care. 12,13 In continuation, medical students also learn about the legal and regulatory frameworks pertaining to pandemics, which can be efficiently used to ensure an organized response. 14 Owing to the wide range of teaching-learning activities, medical students become self-directed learners and in order to stay abreast with recent developments, they become lifelong learners. ...
... 19 In short, the training imparted to medical students exposes them to comprehensive knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are a must for mounting an effective pandemic preparedness and response. [12][13][14][15][16][17] This training is crucial in preparing competent and resilient healthcare professionals who are capable and well-equipped to effectively respond to the challenges posed by infectious disease outbreaks. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]15,16 Medical curriculum and pandemic preparedness Considering the wide extent to which pandemics can account for the loss of lives, human suffering, im-pairment of different sectors, and the potential that medical education can bridge the existing gap, there is an immense need to integrate topics pertaining to the pandemic and their preparedness in the medical curriculum. ...
... [12][13][14][15][16][17] This training is crucial in preparing competent and resilient healthcare professionals who are capable and well-equipped to effectively respond to the challenges posed by infectious disease outbreaks. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]15,16 Medical curriculum and pandemic preparedness Considering the wide extent to which pandemics can account for the loss of lives, human suffering, im-pairment of different sectors, and the potential that medical education can bridge the existing gap, there is an immense need to integrate topics pertaining to the pandemic and their preparedness in the medical curriculum. 4,20 The regulatory body in India has introduced a pandemic module that has to be implemented across all professional years of undergraduate training with the intention to expose medical students to all essential aspects of pandemic, including their containment. ...
Every pandemic that has been reported to date has impacted different domains of human life and civilization. The training imparted to medical students during their medical education is expected to enhance their competence and deal with the potential challenges that every pandemic places on human mankind. Medical education is expected to influence our pandemic preparedness in a multiple number of ways and it becomes our responsibility to expose medical students to different aspects during their training period in an incremental manner. Considering the wide extent to which pandemics can account for the loss of lives, human suffering, impairment of different sectors, and the potential that medical education can bridge the existing gap, there is an immense need to integrate topics pertaining to the pandemic and their preparedness in the medical curriculum. In conclusion, there is an immense need to ensure pandemic preparedness in medical education to produce resilient and adaptable health professionals. The need of the hour is to adopt a curriculum that has components of pandemic-related topics in a structured and systematic manner. This calls for the need to adopt a flexible curriculum and expose students to a structured training program, and effective communication skills.
... It promotes the wellbeing of persons, communities, as well as economic prosperity and national development. However, public health decisions for the pandemic control measures were made under difficult circumstances driven by urgency and panic, with uncertainties and complexities for public goods over individual rights (Aliyu 2021). Besides, it is important to understand that public health ethics goes beyond partial considerations to embrace impartial values of social justice and public trust towards the governing bodies. ...
COVID-19 is a global pandemic that has unmasked the underlying and once-ignored challenges in public health, especially in Africa. The pandemic has adversely disrupted people’s lives where systemic and structural inequalities have taken root owing to the interaction among religious, political, economic, socio-cultural, environmental and other influential factors, resulting in adverse outcomes. These interactions affected not only the psychological, physical, emotional and social wellbeing of all humanity but also their ethical way of thinking. Adherence to the local government ministry of health’s stringent measures, such as voluntary self-quarantine or forced quarantine, may be unattainable. This raises several ethical issues that are not new but which become intensified in pressing situations. Ethically, legitimate public health measures and conservative environmental efforts are easier to voluntarily comply with than being enforced. In this article, a phenomenological methodology was employed to not only debunk the ethical difficulties in adhering to the pandemic’s preventive protocols, but also to reason on the entwinement between the public health and environmental concerns. The article foregrounded that the COVID-19 pandemic is both a healthcare crisis and an environmental ethics challenge. In focussing on how systemic and structural inequalities influence social life, the article argued that public health ethics informs environmental conservation towards a more holistic approach to health and wealth that flows from environmental health ethics.Contribution: The article advanced ongoing discussions on environmental health ethics. Environmental health ethics is a transdisciplinary and integrated approach that upholds sustainable balance and optimisation of the health of people, animals and ecosystems. A sensitisation and realisation of our inter-webbed relatedness to all, is a major step towards sustainable health and wealth.
... The COVID-19 pandemic is demanding ethical reflections with new dimensions. During health crises, the need for ethical standards and accountability becomes imperative [75]. Healthcare providers, governments and policy-makers worldwide have a responsibility-a duty of care-to protect public health, and they are ethically required to focus on "the common good". ...
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected the entire world, has not only created a number of emerging issues for each country, especially in the field of public health, but has also provided a number of opportunities for risk management, alternative strategies and completely new ways of looking at challenges. This brief report examines the COVID-19 pandemic response in Türkiye and the possible implications of the experience for future responses to other health emergencies and disaster risk management, based on the lessons learned. This study uses publicly available literature from government, private sector and academic sources to analyse the conflicts, changes and lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, which are components of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (Health EDRM) framework. The COVID-19 experience in Türkiye has several aspects, including the significant role of healthcare workers, the existence of an effective health system accustomed to emergencies, applications based on information technologies, the partial transparency of public authorities in providing information and a socio-cultural environment related to cooperation on prevention strategies, including wearing masks and vaccination. Challenges in Türkiye include distance learning in schools, lockdowns that particularly affect the elderly, ensuring environmental sustainability, hesitation about the effectiveness of social/financial support programs, the socio-cultural trivialisation of pandemics after a while and the relaxation of prevention strategies. Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic include the value of transparency in public health/healthcare information, the strengthening of all aspects of the health system in terms of health workers and the importance of a balanced economy prepared for foreseeable risks.
... In this context, the applicability of the principles of value and science was considered in decision-making. Elements such as non-discrimination, equity, severity, freedom, privacy, proportionality, public protection from harm, solidarity, reciprocity, and public trust were points to be considered (Aliyu, 2021). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic brought an overload of health systems, with the search for beds to support the demand of patients hospitalized for COVID-19, the heterogeneity and availability of resources in the public and private spheres, was evidenced throughout the pandemic, demonstrating different organizational policies in different regions of Brazil to face the pandemic. To understand the challenges and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, focusing on the coping policies adopted and their consequences on public health, a literature review was conducted. There was a need to understand the panorama of government actions and their effects on reducing the transmission of the virus, on the response capacity of the health system, and on the social impacts. This review is based on the investigation and analysis of the existing scientific production in the literature, providing a comprehensive compilation of information, covering various topics, allowing the identification of relevant knowledge gaps that can serve as a basis for future research. The country's economic policy needed to use financial resources to face the crises of the pandemic in the sectors of science, education, health, technology and social protection. This crisis resulting from the pandemic on a global scale also provided a crisis of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), fostering reflections to restore the progress of the SDGs. It is observed that the COVID-19 pandemic has provided negative impacts on the entire world population, stimulating a gap for the reflection of policies to cope with pandemic outbreaks.
... First, data were collected only from Koreans, thus limiting generalizability of the results to other ethnic groups or countries. Further research with multiple ethnicities and different countries is necessary to examine the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic 35 . Second, data on patients with separate covariate of RA and OA were only available from 2005-2021and information prior to 2005 was not available. ...
Studies on the trends in the prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis (OA) are limited, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to analyze the temporal trend of RA and OA in South Korean adults from 1998 to 2021, including the COVID-19 pandemic period. The Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) data on adults aged ≥ 19 years were analyzed to investigate the prevalence of RA and OA from 1998 to 2021. The prevalence trends were compared by the years, and βdiff (β difference) was calculated. Odds ratios (ORs) were computed for each disease to examine changes in disease prevalence before and during the pandemic in order to determine the impact of the pandemic on disease prevalence. Among 163,221 Korean adults, the prevalence of RA and OA showed a steady decrease from 2005 (RA: from 1.91% in 2005–2007 to 1.55% in 2016–2019 and OA: from 9.75% in 2005–2007 to 8.27% in 2016–2019), but there was a slight increased after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (RA: from 1.23% in 2020 to 1.36% in 2021 and OA: from 8.04% in 2020 to 8.27% in 2021). Vulnerable groups, including participants aged ≥ 60 years (versus 19–60 years, ratio of ORs: 1.222; 95% CI 1.011–1.477), urban residents (ratio of ORs: 1.289; 95% CI 1.007–1.650), and participants with higher education level (ratio of ORs: 1.360; 95% CI 1.119–1.653) showed higher ORs of OA, whereas no particularly vulnerable population was observed for RA. Our findings provide an insight into the long-term trends of RA and OA among adult population and highlight a novel perspective on the impact of COVID-19 on disease prevalence.
... The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing ethical reflection in new directions, and many of these. During health crises, the need for ethical standards and accountability becomes imperative [75]. Healthcare providers, governments worldwide and policy makers have a responsibility, a duty of care, to protect public health and it is ethically justified to focus on "the common good". ...
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected the entire world, has not only created a number of emerging issues for each country, especially in the field of public health, but has also provided a number of opportunities for risk management, alternative strategies and completely new ways of looking at challenges. This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic response in Türkiye and the possible implications of the experience for future responses to other health emergencies and disaster risk management, based on the lessons learned. This study uses publicly available literature from government, private sector, and academic sources to analyse the conflicts, changes and lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, which are components of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (Health EDRM) framework. The COVID-19 experience in Türkiye has several aspects, including the significant role of healthcare workers, the existence of an effective health system accustomed to emergencies, applications based on information technologies, partial transparency of public authorities in providing information, and socio-cultural environment related to cooperation on prevention strategies, including wearing masks and vaccination. Challenges in Türkiye include distance learning in schools, lockdowns that particularly affect the elderly, ensuring environmental sustainability, hesitation about the effectiveness of social/financial support programmes, socio-cultural trivialisation of pandemics after a while, and relaxation of prevention strategies. Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic include the value of transparency in public health/healthcare information, the strengthening of all aspects of the health system in terms of health workers, and the importance of a balanced economy prepared for foreseeable risks.
... The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO). 1 Its expansion has triggered an unprecedented pandemic emergency worldwide, 2,3 showing that the different countries were unprepared. 4 The spread of the disease has emphasised the significance of quickly recognising new epidemic clusters and patterns, while ensuring the adoption of local risk containment measures, and providing the necessary healthcare support to the population. 5,6 Many works have analysed key concepts and issues like virology, pathogenesis, symptoms and clinical manifestations, diagnosis, complications 7 and treatment. ...
Objective
Coronavirus disease 2019 demonstrated the inconsistencies in adequately responding to biological threats on a global scale due to a lack of powerful tools for assessing various factors in the formation of the epidemic situation and its forecasting. Decision support systems have a role in overcoming the challenges in health monitoring systems in light of current or future epidemic outbreaks. This paper focuses on some applied examples of logistic planning, a key service of the Earth Cognitive System for Coronavirus Disease 2019 project, here presented, evidencing the added value of artificial intelligence algorithms towards predictive hypotheses in tackling health emergencies.
Methods
Earth Cognitive System for Coronavirus Disease 2019 is a decision support system designed to support healthcare institutions in monitoring, management and forecasting activities through artificial intelligence, social media analytics, geospatial analysis and satellite imaging. The monitoring, management and prediction of medical equipment logistic needs rely on machine learning to predict the regional risk classification colour codes, the emergency rooms attendances, and the forecast of regional medical supplies, synergically enhancing geospatial and temporal dimensions.
Results
The overall performance of the regional risk colour code classifier yielded a high value of the macro-average F1-score (0.82) and an accuracy of 85%. The prediction of the emergency rooms attendances for the Lazio region yielded a very low root mean square error (<11 patients) and a high positive correlation with the actual values for the major hospitals of the Lazio region which admit about 90% of the region's patients. The prediction of the medicinal purchases for the regions of Lazio and Piemonte has yielded a low root mean squared percentage error of 16%.
Conclusions
Accurate forecasting of the evolution of new cases and drug utilisation enables the resulting excess demand throughout the supply chain to be managed more effectively. Forecasting during a pandemic becomes essential for effective government decision-making, managing supply chain resources, and for informing tough policy decisions.
... 87 Finally, in addition to translating the assessment framework for use per country, there is also a need for an overarching assessment framework that can guide the fair distribution of technology between countries. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic showed the need for and lack of a fair distribution of vaccinations, 88,89 and the need for a waiver of intellectual property rights for producing these vaccines. 90 To ensure full universal health coverage with all types of digital technology during pandemics, an assessment framework could guide technology development and distribution over the world, considering which countries are at greatest risk. ...
Objectives:
The Dutch government implemented the apps 'CoronaMelder' and 'CoronaCheck' to prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. They faced many questions on how to responsibly implement such technologies. Here, we aim to develop an assessment framework to support the Dutch national government with the responsible design and implementation of technologies for the prevention of future infectious diseases.
Study design:
Three-stage web-based Delphi process.
Methods:
The assessment framework was developed through two research phases. During the Initial Design phase, a conceptual version of the assessment framework was developed through a scoping review and semistructured interviews with a scientific board. The Consensus phase involved a three-stage web-based Delphi process with an expert community.
Results:
The final assessment framework consists of five development phases, 10 values, and a total of 152 questions.
Conclusions:
Technology assessment frameworks help policymakers to make informed decisions and contribute to the responsible implementation of technologies in society. The framework is now available for the Dutch government and other stakeholders to use in future pandemics. We discuss the possibilities of using the framework transnationally.
... With the outbreak and pandemic of COVID-19, an increasing number of people died of it, thus strict control measures (wearing masks, suspensions of work and classes, reducing personnel turnover, isolating patients and suspected patients, etc.) being taken to restrain the spread and destruction of COVID-19. 7 Because of the unfamiliarity of COVID-19, this kind of disease is extremely refractory. From clinical observations, scientists have found that COVID-19 can disturb many physiological processes of the human body. ...
With the outbreak and pandemic of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), a huge number of people died of it. Apart from lung injuries, multiple organs have been confirmed to be impaired. In COVID-19 time, primary wound healing processes always prolong, however, its possible underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Therefore, to overcome this clinical problem, clarifying its underlying mechanisms clearly is necessary and urgently needed. In this review, we summarized that COVID-19 can prolong primary wound healing by inducing excessive inflammation and oxidative stress, disturbing immune system and haematological system, as well as influencing the functions and viability of epidermal stem cells (ESCs). Otherwise, we summarized that the strict control measures of blocking up COVID-19 pandemic can also have side effects on primary wound healing process.
