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More than 3,997,000 people have died from the coronavirus worldwide

Posted on by • Posted in Asymptomatic Transmission, Coronavirus, Coronavirus Delta Variant, Coronavirus Mutation, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Public Health, Public Opinion, Public Perception, Social Distancing, Vaccination, Vaccine, Vaccine Distribution, Vaccine Efficacy, Vaccine Hesitancy Rate, Vaccine Safety, Vaccine Supply • Leave a comment
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/mapping-spread-new-coronavirus/?wpmk=1&wpisrc=al_news__alert-politics–alert-national&utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert&pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJjb29raWVuYW1lIjoid3BfY3J0aWQiLCJpc3MiOiJDYXJ0YSIsImNvb2tpZXZhbHVlIjoiNWI2M2EzNDJhZGU0ZTI3Nzk1NTBjYTFiIiwidGFnIjoid3BfbmV3c19hbGVydF9yZXZlcmUiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy53YXNoaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5jb20vZ3JhcGhpY3MvMjAyMC93b3JsZC9tYXBwaW5nLXNwcmVhZC1uZXctY29yb25hdmlydXMvP3dwbWs9MSZ3cGlzcmM9YWxfbmV3c19fYWxlcnQtcG9saXRpY3MtLWFsZXJ0LW5hdGlvbmFsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9YWxlcnQmdXRtX21lZGl1bT1lbWFpbCZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249d3BfbmV3c19hbGVydF9yZXZlcmUmbG9jYXRpb249YWxlcnQifQ.H_bZQ-MxFNKZ0GjBIR1_Y5jUdLtPyWfWxZlA-0_1wUE
Coronavirus Outbreak: Live Updates and News for Apr. 10, 2020 - Bloomberg

The coronavirus has killed nearly 4 million people since it first emerged in Wuhan, China, in 2019, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

New confirmed cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, remain high, and the world struggles with unequal vaccine rollouts and new threats posed by fast-spreading variants.

“The pandemic is a long way far from over,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned in May. “It will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere.”

Some countries have already found that the spread of the virus is outpacing their vaccination plans, especially in the face of proliferating variants. In India, new daily cases topped 400,000 in early May — a global record but probably an undercount.

China now leads the world in the number of vaccine doses given out, though some other nations have vaccinated far more of their population. The vaccines were developed and rolled out at record speed, and studies show most have impressive efficacy.

More than a billion doses have been administered around the world, far more than the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic — though a large number of cases were likely never recorded, experts caution.

But the vaccine rollout has been persistently unequal, with problems with global supply and pockets of opposition in many nations. Covax, a program to distribute vaccines fairly backed by the World Health Organization, only belatedly began distributing doses to low-income nations.

“I can’t say it’s surprising,” said Thomas J. Bollyky, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “In every previous pandemic where we have our global health crisis, where there has been limited supplies of medical intervention, wealthy nations have hoarded.”

The United States, which continues to have the highest cumulative number of confirmed cases and deaths globally. More than 590,000 deaths from covid-19 have been recorded across the country.

Though cases dipped after January, a new wave began only a few months later, prompting President Biden to urge governors to reinstate mask mandates and other virus-related restrictions. “This is deadly serious,” Biden said in March.

Behind the United States, India, Brazil, France and Turkey have the largest number of cases.

India’s record-setting surge this spring meant the country accounted for about 1 in 3 of all new confirmed cases. The spike, which has been blamed on complacency and the lifting of restrictions, along with the spread of variants, has seen the country’s health-care system overwhelmed amid widespread oxygen shortages.

Even after the spike in new cases subsided in mid-May, India still set records for the number of new daily deaths with more than 4,500 deaths from covid-19 reported in a single 24-hour period.

In India, as in Britain and Brazil before it, some of the spread of the virus has been blamed on fast-spreading variants rampant in the country.

The variant widespread in India, known by the name B.1.617.2, has spread far beyond its borders. In May, British officials warned that it would likely become dominant across Britain unless more was done to control its spread.

Sharon Peacock, director of the U.K.’s Covid-19 Genomics Consortium, told reporters that a fast-spreading variant such as B.1.617.2 had “a biological passport for international travel and global spread” — making its spread difficult, if not impossible, to fully contain.

Some countries have seen success at controlling the virus.

In New Zealand, which closed its borders and ordered people to stay home as a first wave hit in the spring of 2020, confirmed infections went down to zero for a time. Taiwan and Singapore have kept their outbreaks far smaller than those in other parts of the world, which some experts attribute to their early responses and sophisticated tracking and tracing.

China, the early epicenter of the crisis, has seen much of daily life return to normal. In the early months of the outbreak, it reported more cases than any other country. Its tally of new infections peaked in mid-February of 2020 and approached zero by mid-March, although questions surround the accuracy of its data.

Wuhan, the virus’s initial epicenter, ground to a standstill in January 2020 as the coronavirus spiraled out of control. But after months without a confirmed case of domestic transmission, about 1.4 million children in the city returned to classrooms at the start of September, and crowded events have resumed.

Countries that have successfully rolled out vaccines are also seeing important gains. Britain, one of the hardest-hit countries in terms of cases and deaths, has excelled in the distribution of coronavirus vaccines. It was the first country to roll out a fully tested vaccine to the general public in December, when it began distributing the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Moderna.

Data released by Public Health England in March suggested that vaccinations had saved over 6,000 lives among people over 70, if not more.

Israel, which has seen several waves of the virus, had raced ahead of other nations and given the first doses of Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine to more than a third of its population by the end of January. Data from Israel indicated that the Pfizer vaccine was around 94 percent effective at stopping asymptomatic infection.

Early signs from the country suggest that the large scale of vaccinations has had an impact on the spread of the virus.

But global health experts have cautioned that despite the success of vaccines, the virus remains a potent threat and returning to normal life too early could ultimately extend the length of the pandemic and lead to fresh new cases.

Though wealthy countries have taken some steps to ensure vaccines are shared around the world, such as by donating through Covax or supporting waivers on intellectual property such as the Biden administration has done, experts say they are worried by the ongoing level of spread.

“Sadly, unless we act now, we face a situation in which rich countries vaccinate the majority of their people and open their economies, while the virus continues to cause deep suffering by circling and mutating in the poorest countries,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said at a meeting of the World Health Assembly on May 24.

Why COVID-19’s Death Toll Will Climb Long After the Pandemic Is Over

Posted on by • Posted in Asymptomatic Transmission, Congressional Research Service (CRS), Coronavirus, Coronavirus Delta Variant, Coronavirus Mutation, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Social Distancing, Vaccine, Vaccine Distribution, Vaccine Efficacy, Vaccine Hesitancy Rate, Vaccine Safety, Vaccine Skepticism, Vaccine Supply • Leave a comment

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Covid-19 Cases, Death Rates Are Declining Six Months Into Pandemic - WSJ

If you were anything like my family over the July 4 holiday, there were bowls of potato salad, casseroles of baked beans and platters of hotdogs, hamburgers and chicken all pulled from the grill and served family-style. For a lot of us, it was the first time seeing a wide net of our family in more than a year and we took advantage of ditching the masks, probably wrongly assuming our circles were vaccinated at higher levels than they were and maybe even handing kids lighters for sparklers they shouldn’t be wielding.

Our increasing return to normal makes it easy to believe the pandemic is almost over. Sure, we still had to wear masks on the flights, trains and buses. Grocery markets and big-box stores in some communities still asked that we wear them, too. The staff at Nationals Park here in D.C. and Progressive Field in Cleveland wore theirs as I visited both for MLB games. But the worst of the pandemic feels behind us here in the U.S., as vaccinations are climbing, deaths and new cases are sinking and headlines seem to be shifting to more run-of-the-mill topics like tropical storms.

A new and unusually long report from Congress’ independent think-tank is a stark warning to the U.S. government that even COVID-19 seems over, it actually isn’t, particularly when it comes to Americans’ well being. Released on Friday, the wonks at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) urged officials going into the long holiday weekend to remember amid the celebrations that we still don’t know the final toll of the pandemic, especially when it comes to long-term consequences for behavioral and mental health. Its notes about substance-abuse challenges are particularly worrying, given that lawmakers cannot ignore the already troubling fight against opioids.

Anecdotally, we know the last 18-or-so-months have taken a toll on our friends, colleagues and neighbors. Those of us lucky enough to have been allowed to work from home adapted in fits and starts. My colleagues with children or dependents were stretched to the points of breaking, but most have made it to the other side. Those in complete isolation actually came to look forward to Zoom meetings and telemedicine appointments. And tech-slow people like my grandmother probably wouldn’t have made it through without the good folks at the local public library loading her loans into the trunk through a touch-free lending system.

But you cannot make public policy on anecdotes alone, which is why the CRS report offers a roadmap for lawmakers. Noting upfront that the data is still coming in and comparisons so quickly after—and during, really—a so-recent period are imprecise, there are still warning signs that America has not healed the way we’d like to believe. The share of Americans suffering simultaneously from depression and anxiety grew five-fold, year-over-year, in just the first three-months of the pandemic-mandated lockdown, from April to June 2020, when the death toll still hovered around 120,000. Fatal overdoses grew 11% between March and May last year, and non-fatal overdoses rose 19% during that same short window. In the three months that followed, there were almost equal levels of depression or anxiety among households that had lost jobs and those that had not. No one was spared, but the hit came hardest for less-educated, essential and lower-paid workers.

Why is this Washington’s problem? An estimated 10% to 20% of Americans who needed mental-health services during the pandemic received no treatment. Another survey cited in the report estimates that up to a quarter of adults with depression or anxiety went untreated. As many as 27,000 Americans who survived COVID-19 may end up dead over the next decade as a result of behavioral health-related challenges, and that number may ultimately reach more than 154,000. At the moment, federal law does not require mental health services to be treated on par with treatments for physical health. Not Medicare. Not CHIP. Not even fancy private insurance plans.

There were, believe it or not, a few upsides to the COVID-19 pandemic that the CRS report notes. Under emergency powers granted in one of the relief bills, the Department of Health and Human Services waived the in-person requirement for some treatments, including mental health and substance abuse counseling. For now doctors can be paid for that phone call consultation rather than requiring patients to make a brick-and-mortar visit to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid money. The Department of Veterans Affairs allowed taxpayer dollars to help with mental health services via tech platforms, too. In all, billions of dollars were included in the raft of COVID-19 stimulus plans to shore up mental health and substance abuse programs.

But those were the bright spots. Not all of Washington’s urgent changes were for the better. The Drug Enforcement Agency allowed doctors to prescribe medicine without a physical appointment, Health and Human Services’ civil rights unit turned a lot of blind eyes to patients’ privacy rights as public health data seemed ubiquitous, and the Small Business Administration shoved piles of cash out the door to health clinics and larger rafts of money to hospitals with minimal upfront scrutiny.

So as Washington turns slowly toward the post-pandemic policies of this country, lawmakers have plenty to consider, especially if it wants to return America to its Before Times footing. As much as it may feel like the United States is rounding a corner—and it’s tough not to when you see big crowds gathering maskless for fireworks and parades—the reality is this: there’s still a lot of trauma under the surface that is all too easy to miss unless D.C. is looking for it.

Hastening the demise of independent physician practice

Posted on by • Posted in Disruption, Investment Banking, Investor Owned, Market Consolidation, Physician, Physician Acquisition, Physician Compensation, Physician Employment, Physician Independence, Private Equity, Value Creation, Value Proposition, Value-Based Healthcare • Leave a comment

https://mailchi.mp/bfba3731d0e6/the-weekly-gist-july-2-2021?e=d1e747d2d8

Physician Practice Sales to Private Equity Doubled in 3 Years

A new report from consulting firm Avalere Health and the nonprofit Physicians Advocacy Institute finds that the pandemic accelerated the rise in physician employment, with nearly 70 percent of doctors now employed by a hospital, insurer or investor-owned entity.

Researchers evaluated shifts to employment in the two-year period between January 2019 and January 2021, finding that 48,400 additional doctors left independent practice to join a health system or other company, with the majority of the change occurring during the pandemic. While 38 percent chose employment by a hospital or health system, the majority of newly employed doctors are now employed by a “corporate entity”, including insurers, disruptors and investor-owned companies.

(Researchers said they were unable to accurately break down corporate employers by entity, and that the study likely undercounts the number of physician practices owned by private equity firms, given the lack of transparency in that segment.) Growth rates in the corporate sector dwarfed health system employment, increasing a whopping 38 percent over the past two years, in comparison to a 5 percent increase for hospitals.

We expect this pace will continue throughout this year and beyond, as practices seek ongoing stability and look to manage the exit of retiring partners, enticed by the outsized offers put on the table by investors and payers.