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The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication

Governmental reactions to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as ethics communication. Governments can contain the disease and thereby mitigate the detrimental public health impact; allow the virus to spread to reach herd immunity; test, track, isolate, and treat; and suppress the disease...

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Autor principal: HÄYRY, MATTI
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cambridge University Press 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7287298/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32438949
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963180120000444
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description Governmental reactions to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as ethics communication. Governments can contain the disease and thereby mitigate the detrimental public health impact; allow the virus to spread to reach herd immunity; test, track, isolate, and treat; and suppress the disease regionally. An observation of Sweden and Finland showed a difference in feasible ways to communicate the chosen policy to the citizenry. Sweden assumed the herd immunity strategy and backed it up with health utilitarian arguments. This was easy to communicate to the Swedish people, who appreciated the voluntary restrictions approach and trusted their decision makers. Finland chose the contain and mitigate strategy and was towards the end of the observation period apparently hesitating between suppression and the test, track, isolate, and treat approach. Both are difficult to communicate to the general public accurately, truthfully, and acceptably. Apart from health utilitarian argumentation, something like the republican political philosophy or selective truth telling are needed. The application of republicanism to the issue, however, is problematic, and hiding the truth seems to go against the basic tenets of liberal democracy.
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spelling pubmed-72872982020-06-11 The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication HÄYRY, MATTI Camb Q Healthc Ethics Research Article Governmental reactions to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as ethics communication. Governments can contain the disease and thereby mitigate the detrimental public health impact; allow the virus to spread to reach herd immunity; test, track, isolate, and treat; and suppress the disease regionally. An observation of Sweden and Finland showed a difference in feasible ways to communicate the chosen policy to the citizenry. Sweden assumed the herd immunity strategy and backed it up with health utilitarian arguments. This was easy to communicate to the Swedish people, who appreciated the voluntary restrictions approach and trusted their decision makers. Finland chose the contain and mitigate strategy and was towards the end of the observation period apparently hesitating between suppression and the test, track, isolate, and treat approach. Both are difficult to communicate to the general public accurately, truthfully, and acceptably. Apart from health utilitarian argumentation, something like the republican political philosophy or selective truth telling are needed. The application of republicanism to the issue, however, is problematic, and hiding the truth seems to go against the basic tenets of liberal democracy. Cambridge University Press 2020-05-22 /pmc/articles/PMC7287298/ /pubmed/32438949 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963180120000444 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
HÄYRY, MATTI
The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication
title The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication
title_full The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication
title_fullStr The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication
title_full_unstemmed The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication
title_short The COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication
title_sort covid-19 pandemic: healthcare crisis leadership as ethics communication
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7287298/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32438949
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963180120000444
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