Triage Decisions During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Clinical Guidelines, Legal Principles, and Public Opinion

The Covid-19 pandemic has severely overburdened the health care systems of several countries. In such situations, different collisions of duties appear: due to a shortage of personnel, technical equipment, or other resources, adequate medical care cannot be provided to all of the patients that need it. Such situations may place an immense burden on decision-makers, who are put in the position of having to choose whom to offer a chance of survival. This kind of choice leads to complex ethical and legal dilemmas, which in the past have been addressed mostly on the basis of hypothetical scenarios. In the first part of the chapter, the authors examine the answers provided by medical ethics and link them to recommendations published by various state medical ethics councils and professional medical associations around the world. In the second part, the authors examine the response of the criminal law system in this situation entailing a so-called conflict of duties (in which an overburdened individual cannot fulfil all of his or her binding obligations).