When Scarcity Meets Disparity: “Resources Allocation and COVID-19 Patients with Diabetes”

The COVID-19 pandemic raised distinct challenges in the field of scarce resource allocation, a long-standing area of inquiry in the field of bioethics. Policymakers and states developed crisis guidelines for ventilator triage that incorporated such factors as immediate prognosis, long-term life expectancy, and current stage of life. Often these depend upon existing risk factors for severe illness, including diabetes. However, these algorithms generally failed to account for the underlying structural biases, including systematic racism and economic disparity, that rendered some patients more vulnerable to these conditions. This paper discusses this unique ethical challenge in resource allocation through the lens of care for patients with severe COVID-19 and diabetes.