Committing to endangerment: medical teams in the age of corona in Jewish ethics
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Committing to endangerment: medical teams in the age of corona in Jewish ethics Tsuriel Rashi1 Accepted: 15 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Doctors have been treating infectious diseases for hundreds of years, but the risk they and other medical professionals are exposed to in an epidemic has always been high. At the front line of the present war against COVID-19, medical teams are endangering their lives as they continue to treat patients suffering from the disease. What is the degree of danger that a medical team must accept in the face of a pandemic? What are the theoretical justifications for these risks? This article offers answers to these questions by citing opinions based on Jewish ethical thought that has been formulated down through the ages. According to Jewish ethics, the obligation to assist and care for patients is based on many commandments found in the Bible and on rulings in the Responsa literature. The ethical challenge is created when treating the sick represents a real existential danger to the caregivers and their families. This consideration is relevant for all dangerous infectious diseases and particularly for the coronavirus that has struck around the world and for which there is as yet no cure. Many rabbis over the years have offered the religious justifications for healing in a general sense and especially in cases of infectious diseases as they have a bearing on professional and communal obligations. They have compared the ethical expectations of doctors to those of soldiers but have not sanctioned taking risks where there is insufficient protection or where there is a danger to the families of the medical professionals. Keywords COVID-19 · Coronavirus · Self-risk · Doctors · Jewish ethics
Background: the danger to the medical teams The coronavirus (COVID-19) global epidemic, which broke out at the end of 2019, is similar to the earlier SARS-CoV-2 virus strain that passed from infected animals to humans and has already caused millions to be infected and hundreds of thousands of deaths. At first, most of the coronavirus morbidity was seen in China. However, from the middle of February 2020 the virus started to spread rapidly and by the middle of March had reached 150 countries and caused a worldwide panic. The World Health Organization declared it a pandemic at the beginning of March 2020. Some doctors and nurses have been seriously infected and tragically some have died. According to Chinese government statistics, more than 3000 doctors have been infected there, nearly half of
* Tsuriel Rashi [email protected] 1
Ariel University, Ariel, Israel
them in Wuhan, where the pandemic began. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who first tried to raise the alarm about COVID-19, eventually died of it. In Italy, the number of infected heath care workers is now twice the Chinese total, and the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists has compiled a list of 170 who are known to have died.1 Medical teams also face the fear of bringing
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