COVID-19 Pandemic in Thailand: Implementing Containment Measures and Their Ethical Challenges
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/dcj.2021.56Keywords:
containment measures, COVID-19, ethical challenges, public policy, ThailandAbstract
Containment measures have been implemented in Thailand after the country was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic with the top priority to save people’s lives. Unavoidably, serious consequences of the pandemic that affected people’s income, privacy rights, equality, and fairness have emerged as the new challenges. In order to begin to investigate these complex ethical aspects, the Office of Research Integrity of the National Science and Technology Development Agency organized a meeting to bring together key experts in various fields related to the COVID-19 pandemic to discuss what was going on in Thailand and how to manage it properly. Three key ethical subject matters were discussed in the meeting, namely economic effects, equality to access the healthcare system, and information reliability. Key ethical issues along with ideas about how best to address and manage them properly were raised during the meeting. This article reviewed the emerging ethical aspects related to the COVID-19 pandemic summarized from the forum to provide an understanding of the overview situation from multidisciplinary fields and to trigger policy setting and cooperative implementation in the next step.
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