PART I
Short Answer Questions
1. Some who become ill with COVID-19 need to be intubated and placed on ventilators. Intubation is a painful, invasive process where a doctor forces a plastic tube down your trachea to keep an airway open. Once intubated, patients are attached to a mechanical ventilator that forces air into their lungs to keep them from suffocating on their own mucus. Ventilation does not guarantee survival. On a scale of one to ten, how comfortable are you with being intubated?
2. Is this 500-person, poorly ventilated lecture hall your first super-spreader event?
3. Are you concerned that you are sitting close enough to your classmates that you can smell their coffee breath and/or the lingering effects of last night’s fraternity rush, given that COVID is now known to be spread primarily through aerosols?
4. Relatedly, the loss of smell and/or taste are sometimes symptoms of the onset of COVID-19. You can smell your classmates, right?
5. The Center for Disease Control recommends contact tracing when you have been exposed to COVID-19. What are the names and contact information of the six people sitting closest to you? (As you ask their names, please write clearly and take care not to inhale.)
6. Intensive care units across the country are at a breaking point, and many have run out of beds. Hospitals have already begun rationing care by canceling so-called elective surgeries (including serious procedures like cancer treatments). In a short essay of no more than 250 words, make a case for why you, rather than a classmate or peer, deserves treatment in the unfortunate event that you contract COVID-19. Be sure to include ethical principles we have discussed in class.
7. During your lifetime, do you remember pandemics of polio, mumps, whooping cough, or diphtheria that forced a global halt to commerce and travel? Why or why not? Please be as specific as possible.
PART II
Multiple Choice Questions
1. More Americans have died from the coronavirus (a disease whose transmission can be lowered through vaccination, masking, and social distancing) over the course of the last year than which of the following wars?
a. Iraq and Afghanistan
b. The Civil War
c. The Vietnam War
d. World War I
e. World War II
f. Any of the above
2. In the event that I am infected due to our shift to in-person classes with little to no mitigation policy while national cases average over 125,000 per day, which is your preferred learning modality?
a. In-person
b. Hospital bed Zoom lectures (tubes permitting)
c. Artificial intelligence composite of my pro-vaccine social media posts
d. Being haunted by my ghost
(This is a trick question: in-person is the only modality allowed.)
PART III
Bonus
Please list the name, address, and phone number of your next of kin.
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