In recent months, as the world’s second-best healthcare system (Italy) got crushed with the corona pandemic, the doctors faced an unprecedented dilemma that they were never trained for — triaging the Covid patients, i.e., deciding who gets a bed in the hospital and who’s left to die.
A news article reported in March —
The most devastating medical crisis in Italy since World War Two is forcing doctors, patients, and their families to make decisions that Marco Resta, a former military doctor, said he has not experienced even in the Kosovo war.
How do you decide who gets the ventilator and who doesn’t? How does one measure the value of human life? I have no clue how even to begin answering this question. But as Daniel Kahneman observed that humans, while thinking about a tough problem, often replace the original question with an easier one.
Bill Bryson, in his book Body: A Guide for Occupants, starts the text by exploring the easier question – what is the value of a human body?
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