id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-346062-q0trgj12	Robert, René	Ethical dilemmas due to the Covid-19 pandemic	2020-06-17		.txt	text/plain	5716	250	44	The devastating pandemic that has stricken the worldwide population induced an unprecedented influx of patients in ICUs, raising ethical concerns not only surrounding triage and withdrawal of life support decisions, but also regarding family visits and quality of end-of-life support. As a result, four new options never applied to date were considered with the common aim of saving a maximum number of lives: to prioritize ICU beds for patients with the best prognosis; to increase at all costs the number of ICU beds, thereby creating stepdown ICUs; to organize transfer to distant ICUs with more beds available, or to accelerate withdrawal of life support in ICUs. Additionally, to protect the patients' relatives, visits for families were prohibited or strongly limited and adequate communication between caregivers and families was disrupted, counteracting more than 20 years of research aimed at improving interaction with families and quality of care during EOL [1] .	./cache/cord-346062-q0trgj12.txt	./txt/cord-346062-q0trgj12.txt