An Experimental Test Of Hospital Admission Guidelines (E.HAG)

During pandemics, hospital guidelines regulate admissions and treatment in case of congestion. These guidelines prescribe the allocation of beds and intensive care units (ICU) based on trade-offs between different moral principles. Despite being discussed extensively in the medicine and philosophy literature, these trade-offs are rarely discussed in the media, and little is known about the views that citizens have about it. We study how people view these moral trade-offs and whether the prevailing moral principles change with the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic. To do this, we conduct a series of surveys in samples of the U.S. population exploiting the temporal and geographical variation in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.