You’ve made some good points, but you missed an important part of the article and you made a factual error.
The article says . . . Brescia wrote in his report that the medical charts showed the patients were “stable, without an immediate or obvious threat of dying.” This is in reference to the patients who died of the morphine/Versed doses. So they weren’t about to die from thier diseases, and they weren’t about to drown because they were on the seventh floor. They died because some of the staff injected them with lethal doses of drugs.
A DNR order, however, is not the bugaboo you’re making it out to be. I’ve dealt with them on a professional level. They are exactly whay they say - no CPR. If a person with a DNR order had a gunshot wound, for example, that person would be sent to surgery as if the order did not exist. The only difference would be if the person went into cardiac arrest, they wouldn’t perform CPR.