Guest post: Coronavirus in Romania - Fighting the war with toilet paper masks: moral courage or reckless thinking?

Guest writer Alexandra Maftei, a psychologist and teacher, analyzes the moral dilemma of doctors in Romania who have to choose between saving lives and their personal safety in the war against COVID-19.

In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, Romania, as well as so many other countries, is facing massive difficulties in supplying hospitals with adequate medic equipment, and a growing number of doctors and nurses are quitting their jobs due to the absence of protective gear.

In the middle of Europe’s worst healthcare system, the general public reaction to their resignations is contradictory: while most of the people condemn the doctors' decision and accuse them of cowardice and lack of mortality, an increasing number of voices applaud their abandonment, emphasizing that doctors should never choose between saving their own life or others', their own safety and their livelihood. Some people compare doctors with soldiers who run away from the field, deserters who leave when they're most needed. On the other hand, people also seem to encourage their retrieval, blaming the system (and, generally, the government), for sending them barehanded, with face masks made out of toilet paper, to fight an invisible, ruthless enemy.

Similar movements across the medical personnel have been spotted across the world, while the number of doctors and nurses who have died due to the COVID-19 rises. In Romania, at the current time, more than 10% of the patients infected with the virus are medical staff. The most commonly evoked reason, besides the lack of equipment, is fear: the fear of dying. In the war-like atmosphere of the country, doctors are asked to be soldiers fighting in combat. It generally seems that the Hippocratic Oath has been silently replaced with a military one, though nobody has made it official, yet.

Still, some doctors choose to fight, even (almost) barehanded, though they might lose their life in the end. Their reaction can be qualified as moral courage as well as reckless thinking, depending on one’s perspective. In light of recent debates exploring