No one should say, “Let them die.”
And no one, in a civilized society, wants to turn away desperately ill patients — although some states are having to ration hospital beds.
But this shouldn’t be happening, either: “Front-line workers at a Missouri hospital are being provided with personal panic buttons after the number of assaults against employees has recently tripled,” ABC News reported on Saturday, October 2, 2021 (read story here). Not all of the assaults are committed by patients — some are by visitors — but most are.
“Between 2019 and 2020, Cox Medical Center” in Branson, Missouri, an Ozarks town of 11,600 people, has seen “assaults increase from 40 to 123, [and] total injuries jump from 17 to 78,” ABC News said, noting that many of those incidents occurred in the ER department.
What’s happening there is happening in many other health care facilities.
Cox Medical Center officials didn’t directly attribute the increase to Covid-19, but said they “realize that frustrations are generally quite high right now.” And early this summer, the Guardian reported (here) that “healthcare workers treating Covid patients around the world have experienced verbal, physical, and sometimes life-threatening attacks,” in countries like India, Mexico, and Italy.
The problem isn’t limited to health care facilities, of course, and people everywhere just seem more on edge, at least partly because of the pandemic. You can kick unruly people off planes, and ban them from stores and restaurants, but it’s not practical to toss troublesome patients out of hospitals. They’re morally and legally obligated to treat sick and injured people, and as Clint Eastwood would say, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Which is lucky for the people who assault the health care workers trying to help them, because in most cases they don’t deserve to be helped.