Some 30 insurers are entering the individual market, and an additional 61 are expanding their service area within states, a KFF report says.
Insurer participation in the Affordable Care Act marketplace in 2021 is seeing a third straight year of growth as several insurers are entering the market or expanding their service area, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundationreport.
For instance, in 2020, UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, became a new entrant in five states, according to the report: Arizona, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Twenty states had new entrants to the market.
For 2021, 30 insurers are entering the individual market, and an additional 61 are expanding their service area within states.
There will be an average of five insurers per state in 2021, up from a low of 3.5 in 2018, but still below the peak of six in 2015. Only 10% of counties will have a single insurer offering in 2021, down from 52% of counties in 2018, the report said. Rural areas tend to have fewer insurers in the ACA market.
Often, when there is only one insurer participating on the exchange, that company is a Blue Cross Blue Shield or Anthem plan, the report said. Before the ACA, state individual markets were often dominated by a single Blue Cross Blue Shield plan.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Despite uncertainties surrounding the ongoing pandemic, the end of the individual mandate and the question of whether the Supreme Court will rule next year to invalidate the entire ACA, the numbers show that insurers appear bullish on participation.
Insurers remained profitable during the pandemic due to decreases in healthcare utilization and claims costs. They are on track yet again to owe substantial rebates to consumers based on low medical loss ratios in 2021.
Even with the lack of a mandate, individuals continue to enroll in ACA plans, with enrollment this year more than keeping pace with last year’s figures. Premiums for 2021 are 1-4% below the average.
THE LARGER TREND
The enrollment numbers continue a trend of rising insurer participation in the ACA going into the 2020 market, and lower premiums.
Insurer participation next year equals the average participation levels at the outset of the marketplaces in 2014, according to the KFF report.
Since 2014, the number of insurers participating on the exchanges has been in flux. Going into the 2018 plan year, many insurers left the market or reduced their footprint due to losses in the market.
In mid-November, as the United States set records for newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases day after day, the hospital situation in one hard-hit state, Wisconsin, looked concerning but not yet urgent by one crucial measure. The main pandemic data tracking system run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), dubbed HHS Protect, reported that on 16 November, 71% of the state’s hospital beds were filled. Wisconsin officials who rely on the data to support and advise their increasingly strained hospitals might have concluded they had some margin left.
Yet a different federal COVID-19 data system painted a much more dire picture for the same day, reporting 91% of Wisconsin’s hospital beds were filled. That day was no outlier. A Science examination of HHS Protect and confidential federal documents found the HHS data for three important values in Wisconsin hospitals—beds filled, intensive care unit (ICU) beds filled, and inpatients with COVID-19—often diverge dramatically from those collected by the other federal source, from state-supplied data, and from the apparent reality on the ground.
“Our hospitals are struggling,” says Jeffrey Pothof, a physician and chief quality officer for the health system of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison. During recent weeks, patients filled the system’s COVID-19 ward and ICU. The university’s main hospital converted other ICUs to treat the pandemic disease and may soon have to turn away patients referred to the hospital for specialized care. Inpatient beds—including those in ICUs—are nearly full across the state. “That’s the reality staring us down,” Pothof says, adding: The HHS Protect numbers “are not real.”
HHS Protect’s problems are a national issue, an internal analysis completed this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows. That analysis, other federal reports, and emails obtained by Science suggest HHS Protect’s data do not correspond with alternative hospital data sources in many states (see tables, below). “The HHS Protect data are poor quality, inconsistent with state reports, and the analysis is slipshod,” says one CDC source who had read the agency’s analysis and requested anonymity because of fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “And the pressure on hospitals [from COVID-19] is through the roof.”
Both federal and state officials use HHS Protect’s data to assess the burden of disease across the country and allocate scarce resources, from limited stocks of COVID-19 medicines to personal protective equipment (PPE). Untrustworthy numbers could lead to supply and support problems in the months ahead, as U.S. cases continue to rise during an expected winter surge, according to current and former CDC officials. HHS Protect leaders vigorously defend the system and blame some disparities on inconsistent state and federal definitions of COVID-19 hospitalization. “We have made drastic improvements in the consistency of our data … even from September to now,” says one senior HHS official. (Three officials from the department spoke with Science on the condition that they not be named.)
CDC had a long-running, if imperfect, hospital data tracking system in place when the pandemic started, but the Trump administration and White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx angered many in the agency when they shifted much of the responsibility for COVID-19 hospital data in July to private contractors.TeleTracking Technologies Inc., a small Pittsburgh-based company, now collects most of the data, while Palantir, based in Denver, helps manage the database. At the time, hundreds of public health organizations and experts warned the change could gravely disrupt the government’s ability to understand the pandemic and mount a response.
The feared data chaos now seems a reality, evident when recent HHS Protect figures are compared with public information from states or data documented by another hospital tracking system run by the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR). ASPR manages the Strategic National Stockpile of medicines, PPE—in perilously short supply in many areas—and other pandemic necessities. ASPR collects data nationwide, although it is more limited than what HHS Protect compiles, to help states and hospitals respond to the pandemic.
In Alabama, HHS Protect figures differ by 15% to 30% from daily state COVID-19 inpatient totals. Karen Landers, assistant state health officer, said nearly all of the state’s hospitals report data to HHS via the Alabama Department of Public Health. Although reporting delays sometimes prevent the systems from syncing precisely, Landers says, she cannot account for the sharp differences.
Many state health officials contacted by Science were reluctant to directly criticize HHS Protect or attribute supply or support problems to its data. Landers notes that Alabama relies on its own collected data, rather than HHS Protect’s, for its COVID-19 response. “We are very confident in our data,” she says, because the state reporting system was developed over several years and required little adjustment to add COVID-19. HHS, she adds, has generally been responsive to state requests for medicines and supplies, although Alabama has not always gotten all the PPE it has requested.
Other states, however, say they do rely on HHS Protect. A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services wrote in a response to questions, “When making decisions at the state level we use the HHS Protect data,” but declined to comment about its accuracy. HHS informed Wisconsin officials it distributes scarce supplies based on need indicated by HHS Protect data, the spokesperson wrote.
Pothof says UW’s hospital system has its own sophisticated data dashboard that draws on state, local, and internal sources to plan and cooperate on pandemic response with other hospitals. But small hospitals in Wisconsin—now experiencing shortages of some medicines, PPE, and other supplies—are more dependent on federal support largely based on HHS Protect data. Help might not arrive, Pothof says, if the data show “things look better than they are.”
If the HHS Protect data are suspect, “that’s a very large problem,” says Nancy Cox, former director of CDC’s influenza division and now an affiliated retiree of the agency. If HHS officials use bad data, they will not distribute medicines and supplies equitably, Cox notes, adding: “Undercounting in the hardest hit states means a lower level of care and will result in more severe infections and ultimately in more deaths.”
Birx and the other managers of HHS Protect “really had no idea what they were doing,” says Tom Frieden, CDC director under former President Barack Obama. (Birx declined to comment for this article.) Frieden cautions that ASPR data might also be erroneous—pointing to the need for an authoritative and clear federal source of hospital data. The original CDC system, called the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), should be improved, he said, but it handles nursing home COVID-19 data skillfully and could do the same with hospitals. NHSN is “not just a computer program. It’s a public health program” built over 15 years and based on relationships with individual health facilities, Frieden says. (CDC insiders say HHS officials recently interfered with publication of an analysis showing that NHSN performed well early in the pandemic [see sidebar, below]).
An HHS official says HHS Protect’s data are complex and the department can’t verify any findings in the reports reviewed by Science without conducting its own analysis, which it did not do. But the official says HHS Protect has improved dramatically in the past 2 months and provides consistent and reliable results.
As for the difference between state and HHS Protect data, an HHS official contends state numbers “are always going to be lower” by up to 20%. That’s because hospitals could lose Medicare funding if they do not report to HHS, the official says, but face no penalty for failing to report to the state. So rather than expect identical numbers, HHS looks for state and federal data to reflect the same trajectory—which they do in all cases for COVID-19 inpatient data, according to another confidential CDC analysis of HHS Protect, covering all 50 states.
Yet the same analysis found 27 states recently alternated between showing more or fewer COVID-19 inpatients than HHS Protect—not always just fewer, as HHS says should be the case. Thirty states also showed differences between state and HHS Protect figures that were frequently well above the 20% threshold cited by HHS, and HHS Protect data fluctuated erratically in 21 states (see chart, below).
“Hospital capacity metrics can and should be a national bellwether,” the CDC data expert says. “One important question raised by the discordant data reported by HHS Protect and the states is whether HHS Protect is systematically checking data validity.” HHS has not provided its methodology for HHS Protect data estimates for review by independent experts. But an HHS official says a team of data troubleshooters, including CDC and ASPR field staff, work to resolve anomalies and respond to spikes in cases in a state or hospital.
Out of sync
Tracking hospital inpatients who have COVID-19 has become a crucial measure of the pandemic’s severity. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) data from the HHS Protect system often diverge sharply from state-supplied data. This chart, drawn from a data analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, summarizes some of the similarities and differences for COVID-19 inpatient totals over the past 2 months.
Along with improving trust in its data, HHS Protect needs to make it more accessible, CDC data scientists say. The publicly accessible HHS Protect data are far less complete than the figures in its password-protected database. This effectively hides from public view key pandemic information, such as local supplies of protective equipment.
The site also does not provide graphics highlighting patterns and trends. This might explain, in part, why most media organizations—as well as President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team—instead have relied on state or county websites that vary widely in completeness and quality, or on aggregations such as The Atlantic magazine’s COVID Tracking Project, which collects, organizes, and standardizes state data. (In comparing state and federal data, CDC also used the COVID Tracking Project.)
Frieden and other public health specialists call reliable, clear federal data essential for an effective pandemic response. “The big picture is that we’re coming up to 100,000 hospitalizations within the next few weeks. Hospital systems all over the country are going to be stressed,” Frieden says. “There’s not going to be any cavalry coming over the hill from somewhere else in the country, because most of the country is going to be overwhelmed. We’re heading into a very hard time with not very accurate information systems. And the government basically undermined the existing system.”
An open bed is “a gift” at a Wisconsin hospital where patients can’t believe other people still don’t take covid-19 seriously.
As the coronavirus pandemic swelled around the 160-bed Mayo Clinic hospital, the day was dawning auspiciously. Two precious beds for new patients had opened overnight. At the morning “bed meeting,” prospects for a third looked promising.
Better yet, by midmorning, there were no patients in the Emergency Department. None. Even in normal times, a medium-size hospital like this can go many months without ever reaching zero.
Everyone knew better than to trust this good fortune. They were right.
From 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., seven patients arrived at the emergency room. Fourteen descended the next hour, then 10 more the hour after that.
About a third had signs of covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, most with trouble breathing. But there was also the man who had smashed his fingers with a hammer. The unresponsive woman who had to be resuscitated. An injured elbow. Neck pain. Acute depression.
By 12:05 p.m., Mayo had put itself on “bypass,” sending all ambulances to the two other hospitals in town, a last-resort move rarely employed. By late afternoon, the emergency room was stashing patients in four beds erected in the ambulance garage — the first time it had adopted that tactic — and holding others for hours as they waited for places in the overflowing hospital.
With more than 91,000 covid-19 patients in their beds, U.S. hospitals are in danger of buckling beneath the weight of the pandemic and the ongoing needs of other sick people. In small- and medium-size facilities like this hit hardest by the outbreak’s third wave, that means finding spots in ones and twos, rather than adding hundreds at a time as New York hospitals did when the coronavirus swept the Northeast in the spring.
“A bed is a gift right now,” said Jason Craig, regional chair for the Mayo Clinic Health System in northwest Wisconsin. “I’ll take all of them.”
In Utah, some doctors acknowledge they are informally rationing care, a euphemism for providing some patients a lower level of service than they should receive. In El Paso, the National Guard has been dispatched to handle the overwhelming number of covid-19 corpses, many held in 10 refrigerated trailers outside the medical examiner’s office.
So far, such extreme measures are not widespread, but only because hospitals have spent months preparing for this catastrophe — one expected to grow worse in the weeks to come as the weather turns cold and Americans move indoors.
More challenging still is locating doctors, nurses, respiratory technicians and other staff needed to provide care as the pandemic places unprecedented demand on the entire nation simultaneously. Even Mayo, one of the most prestigious and well-resourced systems in U.S. medicine, is supplementing its Wisconsin staff with nurses from its hospitals in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota, redeploying nurses from other parts of this hospital and hiring temporary travel nurses who sign on for short assignments.
With nearly 300 staff infected or quarantined in northwest Wisconsin, the system has turned to technological solutions and shuttling patients between hospitals as beds open.
“No one could have forecast what we’re dealing with right now, in regard to what the staff are having to do, what the patients are going through,” said Elysia Goettl, nurse manager of the hospital’s medical-surgical unit.
For two days this month, Nov. 18 and 19, Mayo allowed The Washington Post to watch from inside the largest of its five northwest Wisconsin hospitals as it coped with the virus’s staggering consequences.
On that Wednesday, the health system tallied 341 positive coronavirus tests out of 1,295 given in the main facility and four tiny hospitals in Barron, Bloomer, Menomonie and Osseo — an astonishing positivity rate of 26.3 percent. The state’s seven-day rolling average infection rate that day was even higher, at 32.5 percent. (Six days later, Mayo’s rate would fall to 17.6 percent, and later to 14 percent, though its models forecast a continuing surge of patients.)
In contrast, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) closed the nation’s largest school system the same day, when the city’s seven-day average exceeded just 3 percent. Two days earlier, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) imposed tough new restrictions when the state’s 14-day average positivity rate reached 4.7 percent.
In the main 160-bed hospital here, there were 166 patients at 9 a.m. Wednesday, 60 of them with covid-19. At 4 p.m., after a day of transfers and discharges, there were a total of 147. By Thursday morning, as emergency room patients and others found their way into the hospital, there were 167.
“We thought we may get some bed relief, and then, of course, the law of health care kicks in,” Craig said.
Wisconsin largely evaded the first two waves of the U.S. pandemic, which crashed through the New York area in March and April and the Sun Belt this summer. Unlike Seattle and elsewhere, Wisconsin’s younger people were infected first as the state reopened. Now, the virus is reaching into the older, more vulnerable population.
In room 41129, on the hospital’s fourth floor, 63-year-old Mark Ahrens was beginning to recover from covid-19. Ahrens fell ill about two weeks earlier, overcome by paralyzing fatigue. His lungs clogged, leading to pneumonia.
Three floors down, his wife, Kathryn, was undergoing surgery the same day to clear out pockets of thick fluid from severe covid-19 infection in one of her lungs. A double-leg amputee with diabetes and high blood pressure, she contracted the disease at the same time as her husband. The couple were admitted together. Ahrens hadn’t spoken to his wife in a week.
“I feel real lucky that I’m still here,” Ahrens said. “Because I was in really bad shape when we came in.”
A careful mask-wearer outside the home, Ahrens believes he and his wife, who is 57, were infected by Kathryn’s grandchildren, who visited the couple’s home for a week. Kathryn’s daughter, Sandy Kassa, assumes her children picked up the virus during an outbreak at their day-care center, then passed it on to her and the couple.
“I thought I had the flu,” Kassa said. She suffered from fever, chills and difficulty breathing, which has lingered for weeks, though she has recovered. “Somebody was reaching up inside my rib cage and squeezing my lungs.”
Small family gatherings are thought to be a significant avenue of virus transmission in the current surge. But Kassa didn’t heed the public health warnings until the virus struck three generations of her family.
“I honestly thought before I became sick that people were just being dramatic,” she said. “Now that I’ve experienced it myself, I just know that it’s real.
“I shouldn’t have had my kids over there.”
Ahrens is incredulous at how casually some people are still treating the virus.
“People were … saying it was fake news and stuff. They’ll probably realize in a year from now, when they lose somebody. If they would listen now, they would be here for the next holidays,” he said.
In the room next to Ahrens, 72-year-old Donna Keller said she fought diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration from covid-19 before she was finally hospitalized. “I thought I could whip it,” she said.
Keller said she, too, was careful to safeguard herself against the virus and is unsure how she became infected. But she doesn’t like what she sees on the street.
“The younger kids, I think, feel they can fight this and it doesn’t affect them,” she said. “But they don’t realize that they pass it on to the older people that have a harder time fighting it.”
Ahrens and Keller were discharged Nov. 20, Ahrens to the small Mayo hospital in Bloomer, where he began rehab, and Keller to her home. On Friday, Ahrens’s wife joined him at the hospital in Bloomer.
Until the surge, the floor where they convalesced was reserved for all kinds of medical and surgical patients. On Nov. 18, 38 of its 40 beds were occupied by covid-19 patients, and the hospital was seeking staff so it could fill the last two. More covid-19 patients spill onto the third and fifth floors and into the intensive care unit.
In normal times, Mayo is nearly this full, said Richard A. Helmers, a pulmonologist and vice president for the region’s hospitals. Mayo does brisk business in high-end care, including cardiac surgery and neurosurgery.
But those patients generally follow a predictable course. Doctors and administrators know when they’ll leave, when the next bed will open. Covid-19 patients can linger for weeks, even a month or more, complicating the effort to find space for the current endless surge of sick people.
Despite the overcrowding, officials stress that the hospital is still open to anyone who needs its care.
A glimpse inside the hospital’s sandstone walls reveals little of the stress it is under. The corridors are clean and quiet. Little equipment is visible. Few people scurry through public areas or cluster in conversation. The hospital was designed this way 10 years ago. If necessary, Mayo could close off the covid unit and create one giant negative-pressure system in an attempt to keep the airborne virus contained.
On Ahrens’s floor, nurses attend to covid-19 patients at least once an hour, and each nurse typically is responsible for at least three patients. In an eight-hour shift, nurses must don gowns, gloves, N95 masks and face shields a minimum of 24 times, checking to ensure they are protected against the virus. After each visit, they carefully strip off the protection and dispose of it.
Some nurses are working 12-hour shifts and overtime in a job in which they are holding patients’ hands as they die and helping others grieve over lost loved ones.
Marybeth Pichler was filling in on the floor recently when another nurse asked her to sit with a dying covid-19 patient. He had perhaps an hour to live. He had been given morphine to ease his discomfort.
“I just sat down, and he just talked,” she said. “He talked about how he used to farm and how he had dairy cows and after he sold the dairy cows, he had Black Angus.” After about 25 minutes, the patient took off the mask that provided him high-flow oxygen and soon passed away.
With no visitors allowed, Pichler said she “felt it was an honor to be able to sit with him and hear about his life. Otherwise … he would have been alone when he died.”
“I knew when I volunteered what I was volunteering for,” she added. “When I’m going to work in the morning, I actually pray to be a blessing to someone or to be there for someone.”
For hospital personnel everywhere, the early part of the pandemic meant confronting a new, lethal and unpredictable virus. Now, the dominant theme is burnout from responding all year with no end in sight, coupled with the complications of home life.
“They’re struggling — emotionally, physically. They’re exhausted,” Goettl, the nurse manager of the medical-surgical unit, said. “And they have given 120 percent on their shift, and they walk out exhausted. They go home to a family where they have to give another 120 percent. We do that day in and day out.”
Sara Annis, who supervises the medical-surgical nurses, works long hours at the hospital while her husband puts in 60 to 80 hours a week trying to keep the couple’s brewpub alive. When neither can be home, they leave their children, ages 9 and 12, there alone to attend school online. Neighbors check up on them.
“It’s a huge, huge struggle just to try to balance work and family life right now,” she said.
Mayo is exploring technology to help with the crisis. Before the pandemic, its advanced care at home program was designed as an experiment to determine whether patients who should be hospitalized could be treated in their own homes. They are provided hospital equipment, full-time monitoring from a central control room and visits by paramedics, nurses or nurse practitioners.
But when the virus struck, the program was pressed into service to help ease crowding. Mayo is now caring for five people at home, including covid-19 patient Rita Huebner.
A Mayo paramedic visited Huebner’s small apartment before she arrived, making room for the hospital equipment she would need. Then he and two others delivered her there late that afternoon.
Huebner, 83, said she may have to rehab in a nursing home but for now accepts recuperating at home. “I’m doing pretty good, but not good enough,” she said. “I’m so damn weak.”
Patients trade the security of having trained caregivers at their bedside for the advantages of staying in their own beds, at times with family around them, said Margaret Paulson, chief clinical officer for the at-home program. Remote monitoring can be done at long distances, including from Mayo’s main headquarters in Minnesota.
On Wednesday, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced new measures to encourage more hospitals to adopt telehealth programs that could ease the strain of the pandemic.
Until the surge eases, there is only one glimmer of light at the end of this crisis. On Nov. 19, Mayo was notified that its first shipment of the coronavirus vaccine would arrive in early January. A team already is devising a distribution plan.
“We need hope right now,” Craig said. “Hope is what’s going to get us through the winter.”
What it’s like to stay alive as the virus charts its fatal course through a home for the elderly in one of the worst-hit neighborhoods in the Bronx.
When someone in the building died, a notice was often taped to a window in the lobby: “WE REGRET TO ANNOUNCE THE PASSING OF OUR FRIEND….” The signs did not say how or where the friend had died, and because they were eventually removed, they could be easy to miss. In March, as these names began to appear more frequently at Bronxwood, an assisted living facility in New York, Varahn Chamblee tried to keep track. Varahn, who had lived at Bronxwood for almost a year, was president of its resident council. Her neighbors admired her poise and quiet confidence. She spoke regularly with management, but as the coronavirus swept through the five-story building, they told her as little about its progress as they told anyone else.
Some residents estimated that 25 people had died — that was the number Varahn had heard — but others thought the toll had to be higher. There was talk that a man on the second floor had been the first to go, followed by a beloved housekeeper. An administrator known as Mr. Stern called in sick. Around the same time, Varahn noticed that the woman who fed the pigeons had also disappeared.
The New York State Department of Health advises adult care facilities to inform residents about confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases. But inhabitants of Bronxwood said they were kept in the dark. In the absence of official communication, it was difficult to sort out hearsay from fact. “I was told that it was 42 people,” said Renee Johnson, who lived on the floor above Varahn. “But honestly we don’t know. They are not telling us anything.” When for a couple of weeks Renee herself was bedridden — fatigued and wheezing — there were rumors that she, too, had passed away.
Because so many people were missing, and no one knew where they’d gone, life began to feel like a horror film. The dining room, once an outlet for gossip and intrigue, was shuttered and the theater room padlocked. Staff covered the lobby in tape, as if it were the scene of a crime. The library began filling up with the possessions of those who had vanished: their televisions and computers, their walkers and bags of clothes.
It seemed like a good omen when a few residents came back from the hospital grinning, having faced the ordeal and lived to tell about it. “I wouldn’t even say to them, ‘I thought you were dead,’” Varahn said. “I was just happy to see them.” But then she spotted these survivors in the lobby or going out shopping and worried that the sickness would continue to spread.
The virus was taking the worst toll in the Bronx, and Bronxwood sat within the borough’s hardest-hit ZIP code, although it would be weeks until anyone would know this. But by April, it was clear that elderly Black and brown people with preexisting health conditions, living in crowded housing in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, were among those most susceptible. That many of Bronxwood’s residents belonged to this demographic did not escape anyone there.
When Varahn arrived at Bronxwood in the summer of 2019, she was 65 and still worked at two salons. She hadn’t been planning to move to an assisted living facility, but she was desperate to find an affordable room. She had been sharing a ground-floor apartment with her 28-year-old son in Allerton, a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, before her landlady pushed her out to make space for her grandchildren. Friends told Varahn she should have taken the matter to court, and maybe she could have, but she believed that things happened for a reason.
In the brick vastness of the east Bronx, with its towering apartment blocks and modest duplexes, Bronxwood’s cream-and-beige exterior stood out. The building was just a 20-minute walk up the street from her old apartment, so she didn’t have to worry about missing her clients, her church sisters or the kids she mentored, who called her Mother V. Her benefits covered the $1,270 rent, which included three meals a day and housekeeping. The shared bedrooms — crammed with two twin beds, two stout night tables, two wardrobes and two wooden dressers — were small, but Varahn didn’t think she’d spend much time in hers.
On the first floor, which housed the recreation and meeting rooms, there was always something to do. Staff threw holiday parties and monthly birthday celebrations. Visitors came by to help with knitting and coloring and computer lessons. There was Uno, Pokeno and afternoon bingo. On Wednesdays, members of the cooking club prepared Cornish hens, fish and chips, liver with onions. In the afternoon, bands would perform — classical and jazz, calypso and merengue — and some of the singers were quite talented.
Not long after Varahn moved in, she met Glenda King at a Bible study group. Glenda, who is 68 and has lived at Bronxwood for over seven years, wears square transition lenses and tucks her gray hair into a prim, low bun. Dryly self-deprecating, she considers herself an introvert who has the misfortune to live in a building with 270 other people. She makes a point of being friendly, even though she likes to say that she has no true friends.
At first, Glenda found Varahn to be reserved, but she soon realized that what she had mistaken for detachment was simply Varahn’s way of taking in her new surroundings. Varahn knew how to draw people out and listen to their problems. She had worked as a beautician since high school, first at flagship boutiques in the city and later for the disco diva Carol Douglas and on the sets of Spike Lee films. Her clients felt comfortable confiding in her, and before long, so did the residents of Bronxwood. “I can go up and talk to her about anything,” Glenda told me. “Her forte is humility.”
All adult care facilities are legally required to maintain a forum where residents can independently discuss their living conditions, but some resident councils, like Bronxwood’s, are more active than others. Although Varahn was new to the building, people encouraged her to run for president. She would bring an unusual amount of political experience to the council: She had previously served as vice chair of the Allerton Barnes Block Association and as president of both the neighborhood merchant’s group and a charity society at her church. Under her bed, she stored the plaques from various luncheons that had celebrated her civic advocacy.
After Varahn’s victory in the September elections, Glenda, who had worked for many years as a typist, took on the duties of council secretary, and Hurshel Godfrey, another longtime resident, assumed the vice presidency. Every month, the council gathered in the main lobby, which fit about 60 people, some of them perched on their walkers. Varahn, who has a broad, serious face and a sleek bob, dressed for the occasion in crisp two-piece suits with lapels. She worked to cultivate a shared sense of purpose. “I never said I could do something, even if that was true,” she said. “I always emphasized that we could do it together.”
One of the first things Varahn noticed that fall, as the weather grew colder, was how few residents had proper winter clothes. Some explained that they were stuck indoors because they lacked coats. Old men shuffled around in flip-flops in the rain. In the annual grant application for extra state funding, Varahn secured a bigger clothing allowance — $200 per resident — and a double-oven stove for the communal kitchen. She brought in educational speakers for Veterans Day and Black History Month, and planned field trips to go out dancing and to the casino. “Varahn had a lot of connections,” Hurshel said. “I knew a few people, but she knew a lot.”
Some of the local politicians Varahn was acquainted with started asking her if she had ever considered running for higher office: The City Council elections were coming up in 2021. In February, she started riding the subway to midtown Manhattan to take a class for first-time candidates. Former campaign managers shared tips on electoral strategy and the best kind of eye contact to make with large crowds. Maybe, she thought, electoral politics was her calling.
At this point, the virus was said to be on the other side of the world. It hadn’t yet surfaced in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, or in New Rochelle, just a short drive up the road.
Until the 1980s, elderly Americans with medical needs had limited options: They could age at home with family or aides, or they could “park and die,” as the saying went, at a nursing home.Assisted living facilities emerged as a third way, rejecting the clinical strictures of a medical institution in favor of a more informal, dormlike setting.
In the last four decades, demand for assisted living has soared. The paradigm promises residents the freedom to live autonomously — and operators freedom from regulation. Unlike nursing homes, assisted living facilities are not subject to federal oversight. The standards for care — along with the definition of “assisted living” — vary greatly from state to state (and from facility to facility).
During the pandemic, these freedoms have become liabilities. “If infection control was limited and regulation was already ineffective in nursing homes, it’s almost nonexistent in assisted living,” said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who studies long-term care for older adults. “It’s all the problems we are talking about with nursing homes, but even more so. There’s less regulation, far less staffing and many of the residents are just as sick.” The population in assisted living often closely resembles that of nursing homes, yet there are no requirements that the former provide full-time medical staff. In New York, according to government data, half of those in assisted living are over 85, two-thirds need help bathing and a third have Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia.
At Bronxwood, the state’s third-largest adult care facility, residents said that employees initially lacked protective gear as they cleaned dozens of rooms. As in other homes in the city at the start of the outbreak, shared bathrooms and group meals made it difficult to isolate. And because it is not a medical institution, residents continued to enter and leave the building as they’d always done. (Neither Bronxwood nor Daniel Stern, an administrator, responded to repeated requests for comment.)
Less than 1% of Americans reside in long-term care facilities — a category that includes nursing homes and assisted living residences — but these facilities account for around 40% of the country’s COVID-19 deaths. Researchers caution that this figure represents an undercount. Many states do not publish this data, or do so incompletely, and fewer than half of all states report cases in assisted living facilities, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation. “As a result,” the analysis said, “it is difficult to know the extent to which residents and staff at assisted living facilities have been affected by COVID-19 or the extent to which interventions are urgently needed.”
The way that New York counts deaths has been controversial from the start. That’s because the state’s Health Department will not attribute a death to a residential health care facility unless the death occurs on the premises. The unusual policy has baffled residents and their family members, along with lawmakers and health care experts. “This is a really big hole in New York state data,” Grabowski said. “If someone lives for a long time in a nursing home, it makes no sense that their death is then attributed to the hospital rather than the nursing home.” Without a proper count of cases and deaths, advocates argue, officials cannot direct scrutiny or resources to afflicted homes.
For more than two hours at a hearing in August, legislators repeatedly pressed the state health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, for the number of deaths that could be traced back to residential health care facilities. His answers did not satisfy his interrogators. “It seems, sir, that in this case you are choosing to define it differently so you can look better,” said Gustavo Rivera, the state Senate Health Committee chairman, whose district includes part of the Bronx. “And that’s a problem.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has boasted about the relatively low death toll in the state’s nursing homes, despite the fact that no other state counts these deaths as New York does. As of mid-November, there have been more than 6,619 virus-related deaths within the state’s nursing homes and 179 in its adult care facilities, according to official data. Bronxwood, however, has never appeared in that tally.
“The public list is incomplete and misleading,” said Geoff Lieberman, the executive director of the Coalition of Institutionalized Aged and Disabled, an organization that advocates on behalf of adult home residents in New York City. “Either everyone at Bronxwood died at the hospital, or the information isn’t being accurately reported.” Before the August hearing, Lieberman and his colleagues at CIAD interviewed residents at 28 adult homes in New York City, including Bronxwood, and tallied around 250 deaths from their accounts — a stark contrast to the 53 deaths that facilities had self-reported to the state. Bronxwood employees likewise sounded the alarm: In April, six staff members told local news that by their count more than a dozen residents had died.
Residents played detective, too. In May, when the U.S. death toll hit 100,000, Renee Johnson tried to match the names she saw in the newspaper to those of her missing neighbors. “We lost a lot of friends,” she said. “And you’re scared — you’re really scared — because you don’t know if you’re next.”
Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the Department of Health, defended New York’s approach to counting COVID-19 deaths in residential health care settings. “The Department goes to great lengths to ensure the accuracy and consistency in our data reporting,” he wrote in an email. Bruno did not disclose how many residents died in the hospital after falling ill at Bronxwood, but he noted that the facility passed an infection control survey in May. “Since the start of this pandemic,” he added, “we have made protecting the most vulnerable New Yorkers, including those in adult care facilities, our top priority.”
Slowly and then all at once, everything that had made Bronxwood bearable was taken away. Residents were discouraged from seeing one another, going outside or congregating in common areas. Visitors were banned. Whenever people lingered downstairs or smoked out on the patio, staff ushered them back to their rooms.
Varahn hung posters in the lobby to try to boost morale. The first gave the administration and staff five hand-drawn stars and thanked them “for caring during COVID-19.” “WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER,” read the second, on which she had colored an American flag. Some residents thought their president was doing the best she could, given the circumstances. Others were offended. They didn’t want to thank anyone: They were miserable.
Deborah Berger, who lives on the fourth floor, likened the new regime to living in a giant day care center. Glenda said she felt like a puppy in a doghouse. Renee compared it to jail.
The analogies were ready at hand, but what was harder to express was how little trust they had in the institution tasked with protecting them. “Nobody is talking to us,” Renee said. “The staff just say: ‘Go to your room. Go to your room.’ There’s no feelings. There’s no nothing.”
Glenda washed her hands until she felt as if they were going to fall off. She wiped everything down with bleach — door handles, dresser, windowsill. She had a weak left lung, and she was terrified. “If I get one hit of that coronavirus,” she liked to say, “I’m not going to make it.” When her legs got stiff from sitting, she paced up and down her cappuccino-colored hallway, about the length of a city block. Other times, wearing a surgical mask, she wheeled her walker downstairs, though the state of affairs there could be disappointing. A lot of residents didn’t wear masks. They huddled around the TV and crowded in the elevator. People were getting complacent. “Not me,” Glenda said.
The council had suspended its meetings, but toward the end of April, several residents approached Varahn to report that Bronxwood was not giving them their stimulus checks. In fact, complaints about missing or partial stimulus checks were so widespread throughout the city’s facilities that the state issued a guidance: Residents’ money belonged to residents. Varahn convened an impromptu meeting with the council’s leadership in the stairwell — the only somewhat quiet place in the building — to strategize about what to do.
Hurshel, the vice president, was planning to ask about his check. “Don’t ask,” Varahn coached him. “Say, ‘I came here to get my money and I’ll cash it myself.’” Glenda noted that people with dementia might not remember the existence of the checks in the first place, so she knocked on doors to remind them.
Part of Varahn’s role as president was to relay these and other concerns to Mr. Stern. They had an easy, playful rapport. Sometimes, he asked what an intelligent woman like her was doing living in a place like this. The question flattered her, but it also unsettled her, as if she wasn’t wanted or didn’t belong.
People talked about leaving Bronxwood almost as soon as they arrived, but the truth was that they were there because they had nowhere else to go. The elderly are typically steered to places like Bronxwood after a stay in the hospital. They have taken a fall or needed a surgery, and while they’re recovering, lose their apartment. Others, like Glenda, are recommended by a caseworker at a shelter. It’s not uncommon for such homes to hire recruiters to help fill their beds.
While many assisted living facilities cater to a wealthy clientele, who pay out of pocket, Bronxwood primarily serves low-income seniors. (It is, technically speaking, an adult home with an assisted living program.) Most residents sign over their supplemental security income to pay for the room and board — and out of that sum the facility gives them a $207 “personal needs allowance” each month. The money runs out quickly, since it often goes toward phone bills, toiletries, transportation and more nutritious food.
Out of Bronxwood’s 270 or so residents, more than half are enrolled in its assisted living program, whose costs are covered by Medicaid. In theory, the program offers an extra level of care to those who need it. In practice, it functions as a “huge financial boon” to the adult home industry, said Tanya Kessler, a senior staff attorney with Mobilization for Justice, a legal services organization. Bronxwood can charge Medicaid between $78 and $154 per enrolled resident each day, depending on his or her needs. But Kessler said there’s little oversight into whether this additional funding results in additional care. Bruno, the spokesman, said that the Health Department conducts regular inspections of assisted living programs “to ensure all applicable laws, regulations and guidelines are being followed.”
Healthier residents at Bronxwood told me that they seemed to be roomed with those who were more infirm, effectively placing them in the role of an extra aide. “One of the big complaints we hear is, ‘I’m not well myself, but they put this person in here that they expect me to look after,’” said Sherletta McCaskill, who, as the training director of CIAD, helps adult home residents organize councils and independent living classes. “It speaks to the lack of services that these homes are providing.” The most recent audit by New York’s Office of the Medicaid Inspector General found that Bronxwood had overbilled Medicaid by $4.4 million in 2006 and 2007. (Bronxwood requested an administrative hearing to challenge the findings, according to an OMIG spokesperson; the date is pending.)
In the pandemic, everyone’s escape plans, loudly discussed yet endlessly deferred, took on a new urgency. Residents told Varahn that they were joining the city’s long wait list for subsidized senior housing, or that a son or daughter was coming to rescue them. Faye Washington, who was 68 and lived down the hall from Glenda, tried to compile a list of senior housing options in the Bronx. “You know why I want to get out?” Faye said. “Because when all those people passed away, it killed me.”
Faye told Glenda, “I’m taking you with me.” But Glenda was not in any hurry. It was safer, she felt, to be where an aide could hear if she called for help. She had heart problems, anxiety, memory loss and chronic fatigue. Her family had asked her to stay with them, but she did not want to babysit relatives. As she saw it, if God had wished her to have more children, he would have let her keep getting her period.
Varahn’s family urged her to leave as soon as possible, even if it meant losing a month of rent. But where would she go? Varahn wondered. And then what would she do? The lady who lived across the hall had gone to see her daughter in Georgia, and now she was stuck there while all her things were here.
As the lockdown dragged on, Varahn felt herself sliding into a depression. Before March, she was always out with a client or at some community meeting. Now she was eating three meals a day on a rectangular folding table at the edge of her bed. She was gaining weight from staying inside. Her feet were swollen. Her back hurt.
She started taking walks, sometimes just a few blocks, to relieve the pain. The soccer field across the street, where kids played on Saturdays, was empty. Many of the stores on White Plains Road, Boston Road and Allerton Avenue, including the salons, were closed until further notice, and some days it felt like the entire world was at a standstill.
It wasn’t just the forced isolation that discouraged her. Everything was happening on some sort of screen, and the tedious video engagements and text messages often left her frustrated. In her class for first-time campaigners, which had migrated to Zoom, the connection was always faltering, making it difficult to understand what anyone was trying to say.https://962141ce54c31f8481855073e433ab60.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
At other times, she wasn’t isolated enough. Her roommate rose at dawn and sold loose cigarettes throughout the day. People were always stopping by. Whenever Varahn was on a call or at a virtual meeting, the roommate muttered under her breath or cursed sarcastically. Once, the noise was so disruptive to the class that the instructor told Varahn to mute herself, which she found humiliating. What would have been merely an inconvenient pairing in normal times had under quarantine become an oppressively intimate arrangement. There was also the problem of Varahn’s older sister, Childris, whose heart was starting to fail. The grief put a constant pressure on her days. All this made it hard to concentrate, and she soon fell behind on her studies. So many things about her path to the City Council were uncertain now anyway. Was a person of her age expected to knock on doors? Would she have to campaign through a computer screen?
Varahn began searching for a way to reclaim her freedom. She asked Mr. Stern for a room of her own. As far as she could tell, there was plenty of space in the building. A private accommodation could double as a little office for the council, she reasoned — somewhere that residents could feel comfortable speaking to her. But management never acted on her request. Victoria Kelley, a former jazz singer who had lived at Bronxwood for three years, suspected that Varahn’s battle for the clothing allowance had turned administrators against her. Such retaliation is not unheard of, according to advocates who work with residents at adult care facilities. “If you don’t have someone on the council to fight for you, nothing gets done, but Varahn did fight,” Victoria told me. “Some of the naysayers got jealous.”
With the arrival of spring, a different approach revealed itself to Varahn. First she rented a car, so she could get around more easily. Bright flowers fringed the patio, and slender trees cast ragged patches of shade on the sidewalk. Her errands had been piling up, too. She needed to buy cases of bottled water, pick up her son’s stimulus check from her ex-landlord, haul her sheets to the laundromat after her roommate got bedbugs.
Then she started driving for the pleasure of it, humming along to power ballads on Christian radio and chatting on the phone with friends. She found herself going through the boxes in her U-Haul storage unit, making a mental inventory of all the things she didn’t have space for at Bronxwood, like her slow cooker, her turkey roaster, her Ashley Stewart outfits, her dance costumes. One weekend, a few FOR SALE signs caught her attention. That was when she realized what was happening: She wanted out.
It was a complicated undertaking. Most apartments were too expensive, which is why she hadn’t been able to get one in time last year. And even if she was lucky enough to find something affordable, she would have to keep working — perhaps, if salons weren’t allowed to reopen, somewhere that wasn’t a salon. Then again, she didn’t want any of the residents to feel that she was leaving them behind.
One morning toward the end of July, Glenda’s cellphone rang. The sound surprised her, because she had stopped paying the bill. When Glenda called the number back from the room’s landline, it turned out to be Varahn, who announced that she was moving out the next day and promised to stop by in September “to pass the torch.” Glenda told Varahn she was happy for her, and she was. But she wished her friend had let her know sooner. Hurshel, the vice president, was unable to step in, because he, too, had just left. After five years on the city waitlist for affordable housing, he’d finally landed a new spot. It was less than a block away from Bronxwood. “You have to get out of there,” he warned his old friends.
That same week, Bronxwood laid off employees without warning, apparently because of the declining number of residents. There was no longer an aide for the fourth floor, according to three people who lived there, and there was no one to speak up about it. “I feel stripped naked, like we’re getting ready for the slaughterhouse,” Glenda said the next day. We were sitting down the street, and as staff trailed out of the building at the end of the afternoon shift — a long procession of teal and navy scrubs — some of them were wiping away tears. “Right now, the administration can say anything goes.”
Glenda knew she did not want to serve as president, even in an interim capacity, and asked Renee, a former president, what to do. Renee was telling everyone who had asked her this question the same thing: She didn’t have a clue. “We’re so lost right now,” Renee said to me in August. Her bingo crew had dwindled from more than 15 players to fewer than 10. She was pessimistic about the prospects for a socially distanced election: “We don’t even know who is dead or alive.”
Varahn had implied to Glenda that she was staying in the Bronx. In reality, she was moving to suburban Maryland. She had signed the lease for a one-bedroom apartment in a senior living community just a short drive away from her daughter’s house. It was everything that Bronxwood was not: serene and quiet, lush with greenery.
She had told Glenda only half of the story because she couldn’t quite believe her good fortune. “I feel so sorry because some of them are waiting there thinking that they will someday get an apartment,” Varahn said. “If it wasn’t for my associations” — the support from her family, her earnings from the salon — “I would be stuck there, too.”
Her family was relieved about her departure, but Varahn remained uneasy. With a room of her own, she thought, or even a different roommate, she probably would have stayed. As it was, the likely return of the virus in the winter frightened her.
When she packed up her belongings, she felt as if she were packing up the future she had once imagined for herself. “By now, I would have been running for City Council, if this virus didn’t happen,” she said. “So I’m saying to myself, well, you know, that wasn’t in God’s plan.” Though she kept her move a secret, one resident spotted her carrying boxes in the hallway and asked her, “Are you just going to leave us like that?” It was the same question she had been asking herself for months.
In a handwritten letter Varahn gave to Bronxwood’s administrators before she left, she expressed her desire to remain president from afar until it was safe to hold an election. She had planned to retire there, the letter said, yet it was impossible to do so under the current circumstances. She expected Mr. Stern, or at least his secretary, to call to offer his regrets, but she never got a response. It made her feel as though nothing she had done at Bronxwood mattered — as though she had never lived there at all.
Millions of Americans are in danger of losing their homes when federal and local limits on evictions expire at the end of the year, a growing body of research shows.
A report issued this month from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the University of Arizona estimates that 6.7 million households could be evicted in the coming months. That amounts to 19 million people potentially losing their homes, rivaling the dislocation that foreclosures caused after the subprime housing bust.
Apart from being a humanitarian disaster, the crisis threatens to exacerbate the coronavirus pandemic, according to a forthcoming study in the Journal of Urban Health.
“Our concern is we’re going to see a huge increase in evictions after the CDC moratorium is lifted,” said Andrew Aurand, vice president of research at the NLIHC and a co-author of the report.
The number of Americans struggling to pay rent has steadily risen since this summer, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. In the latest survey, from early November, 11.6 million people indicated they wouldn’t be able to pay the rent or mortgage next month.
Meanwhile, some renters who are still paying rent are relying on “unsustainable” income to make ends meet. Among those who report trouble making rent, “More than half are borrowing from family and friends to meet their spending needs, one-third are using credit cards, and one-third are spending down savings,” the NLIHC report found.
Approaching a “payment cliff”
In early September, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention barred evictions through year-end, describing the move as a public health measure to reduce spread of the coronavirus. The CDC order protects renters earning less than $99,000 if they have lost income during the pandemic and are likely to become homeless if they’re evicted.
Many states and cities also imposed renter protections during the spring and summer, and others established rental assistance programs to help tenants make ends meet. However, both types of programs are quickly expiring.
Once the CDC moratorium expires,Aurand said, “We expect to see a jump in [eviction] filings, and we know that even now, filings are already occurring. Come January, sadly, for a number of tenants, the next step is the landlord will evict them.”
The situation could reach crisis levels in the new year. With Congress yet to pass another coronavirus relief package, about 12 million Americans are set to lose their unemployment benefits the day after Christmas, a sharp fall in income that would make it harder for many people to pay rent. An abrupt cutoff would slash income by about $19 billion per month, Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, said in a research note.
Although the Trump Administration has restricted evictions for most households through the end of the year, it did not relieve renters of the need to pay rent. That means many renters may face a “payment cliff” at year’s end, when they must pay several months’ worth of back rent or face eviction.
“If renters are required to quickly repay past due rent or face eviction, the hardship will fall predominantly on lower-income families who have already been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus crisis,” Vanden Houten wrote.
Said Aurand, “If you were a low-income renter before the pandemic and you were hit financially, even if your income starts to recover, you’re going to have a very hard time paying back that rental debt.”
“What we really need is rental assistance,” he noted. “The underlying problem is renters struggling to pay their rent because we’re in an economic crisis, and the moratorium doesn’t address that.”
Long-term impact
Academics have also pushed for direct aid to renters and homeowners, citing the extreme economic fallout from the coronavirus and related shutdowns. In Los Angeles, where 1 in 5 renters were late on rent at some point this summer, residents are facing “an income crisis layered atop of a housing crisis,” researchers at the University of California – Los Angeles have said.
“Delivering assistance to renters now can not just stave off looming evictions, but also prevent quieter and longer-term problems that are no less serious, such as renters struggling to pay back credit card or other debt, struggling to manage a repayment plan, or emerging from the pandemic with little savings left,” they wrote in August report. “Renter assistance can also help the smaller landlords who are disproportionately seeing tenants unable to pay.”
A groundswell of evictions would cause enormous financial hardship. Losing a home is one of the most traumatic events a family can experience, with research showing that people who have experienced eviction are more likely to lose their jobs, fall ill or suffer from mental-health consequences. Children whose families are evicted are more likely to drop out of school, while evictions also contribute to the spread of COVID-19, according to a forthcoming study from UCLA viewed by “60 Minutes.“
“We’ve got a country that’s about to witness evictions like they’ve never witnessed before,” Laura Tucker, a social worker for Florida’s Hillsborough County School District, told “60 Minutes.”
“An eviction can impact a family’s ability to re-house for more than 10 years,” she said.
For that reason, housing and public health experts have said that rental aid now
“Now is the time for action to provide emergency rental assistance. A failure to do so will result in millions of renters spiraling deeper into debt and housing poverty, while public costs and public health risks of eviction-related homelessness increase,” the NLIHC report says. “These outcomes are preventable.”
People who refuse a vaccine for COVID-19 could find normal life curtailed as restaurants, bars, cinemas and sports venues could block entry to those who don’t have proof they are inoculated, Britain’s new vaccine minister said on Monday.
Several major COVID-19 vaccines have been announced in recent weeks, raising hopes that the world could soon return to some semblance of normality after the coronavirus killed 1.46 million people and wiped out a chunk of the global economy.
The British minister responsible for the vaccine rollout, Nadhim Zahawi, said getting vaccinated should be voluntary but that Google, Facebook and Twitter should do more to fact-check opposing views of vaccines.
Asked by the BBC if there would be an immunity passport, Zahawi said a person’s COVID-19 vaccine status might be included in a phone app that would inform local doctors of a person’s status.
“But also I think you’d probably find that restaurants and bars and cinemas and other venues, sports venues, will probably also use that system as they’ve done with the app,” Zahawi told the BBC.
“The sort of pressure will come both ways: from service providers – who will say ‘look, demonstrate to us that you have been vaccinated’ – but also we will make the technology as easy and accessible as possible.”
Health authorities in many countries have become increasingly concerned in recent years by the growth of anti-vaccine groups, which are especially active on social media.
Asked if it would become virtually impossible to do anything without the vaccine, Zahawi said: “I think people have to make a decision but I think you’ll probably find many service providers will want to engage in this in the way they did with the app.”
Zahawi declined to give any specific date on a vaccine rollout as none have yet been approved for public use.
The message, he said, should be that a vaccine is good for the community and the country.
HENRY KOTULA 