Topic: COVID-19
On March 16, 2020, researchers at the Imperial College of London published a study (Links to an external site.) that modeled various scenarios on the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted global leaders to take the pandemic far more seriously than they previously did. In the study, they distinguish between mitigation, which entails social policies such as quarantining infected persons with the virus and those most vulnerable to fatalities from the virus to lessen the impact of the spread of the virus, and suppression, which is a far more wide-ranging response that includes social distancing practices and masking of all citizens. Focusing on the U.S. in particular, the researchers note that if the U.S. did nothing at all to stop the spread of the virus, roughly 2 percent of the population would die out from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, given the lack of medical supplies. The elderly and persons with a compromised immune system would be at greatest risk of death, as would any individuals with co-morbidities. Mitigation measures would cut this number in half, but would still lead to a significant amount of deaths. Suppression measures, if enforced broadly, had been shown to limit the death toll to the thousands (not millions). While some states in the U.S. opted for suppression, the majority of them opted for mitigation and some simply didn’t enforce any measures whatsoever.
Examine this situation from an ethical perspective by taking one of the ethical theories from Week One and applying it to the coronavirus situation. Should the U.S. have enacted stricter measures that they did or would that have been an affront on the freedom of individuals? Why?
You are expected to cite at least two peer-reviewed articles in your paper. Some examples of places you may want to start your research are as follows:
Fauci, A. S., Clifford Lane, H., Redfield, R. R. (2020). Covid-19: Navigating the uncharted. New England Journal of Medicine 382: 1268-1269. (Links to an external site.)