Virtual visits during the Covid-19 pandemic
Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon. "In early March, the Regional Council of Medicine of São Paulo (Cremesp) published a statement about virtual visits to hospitalized patients diagnosed with Covid-19 (Cremesp, 2021). One of the possible consequences of such instruction may be forbidding virtual visits to unconscious patients, especially intubated ones. The justification for the council's advice is to preserve the right to the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship, given the incapacity of voluntary consent from the patient. It is necessary to discuss this recommendation, which, if in practice, counters what has been understood as humanized care or "good death" (Menezes, 2004) practices and aggravates the isolation imposed by the Covid-19 context in Brazil."