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Cartoon – Masks are for the Weak!!!
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America Now Has 4 Million Covid-19 Cases, As Calls For Mask Mandates Grow
TOPLINE
Seven months since the first coronavirus case in the country was reported, the United State’s total infection count passed the 4 million milestone Thursday, according to a tally from The New York Times, a brutal marker as cases continue to rise in most of the country and calls for masking increase.
KEY FACTS
The number of total fatalities attributed to the virus has exceeded 143,000, the Times reported.
On Wednesday, a record-breaking 12,807 new cases was enough to tip California’s total number past that of New York, once the world epicenter of the pandemic (though its per capita infection rate remains less than New York at its peak).
Nationwide daily virus deaths topped 1,000 fatalities Wednesday for the first time since May.
The troubling numbers come as calls for widespread use of face masks grows, with President Donald Trump, who has in the past downplayed the garment, calling their use “patriotic” in a tweet this week.
Labor Department numbers released Thursday showed unemployment claims over the past week have jumped for the first time since March, rising by upwards of 100,000 to total 1.4 million.
KEY BACKGROUND
Around 230 million Americans are under a form of public masking mandate where they live, amounting to some 70% of the country, according to a Forbes analysis. A politically-charged garment for some, Americans on both sides of the aisle seem to be accepting of face masks mandates—a Politico/Morning Consult poll released this week found that 72% of voters surveyed would support a state mask mandate where they live, though Democrats identified as “strongly support[ing]” such an order roughly twice as much as Republicans, according to the survey.
President Donald Trump and inched closer to voicing support for masking during his first coronavirus briefing in months on Wednesday, saying, “Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact, they’ll have an effect—and we need everything we can get,” Forbes reported.
Canceled elective procedures putting pressure on nation’s hospitals
Even upticks in COVID-19 patients haven’t made up for the revenue losses, since reimbursement for those services is comparatively slim.
Elective procedures are in a strange place at the moment. When the COVID-19 pandemic started to ramp up in the U.S., many of the nation’s hospitals decided to temporarily cancel elective surgeries and procedures, instead dedicating the majority of their resources to treating coronavirus patients. Some hospitals have resumed these surgeries; others resumed them and re-cancelled them; and still others are wondering when they can resume them at all.
In a recent HIMSS20 digital presentation, Reenita Das, a senior vice president and partner at Frost and Sullivan, said that during the pandemic, plastic surgery activity declined by 100%, ENT surgeries declined by 79%, cardiovascular surgeries declined by 53% and neurosurgery surgeries declined by 57%.
It’s hard to overstate the financial impact this is likely to have on hospitals’ bottom lines. Just this week, American Hospital Association President and CEO Rick Pollack, pulling from Kaufman Hall data, said the cancellation of elective surgeries is among the factors contributing to a likely industry-wide loss of $120 billion from July to December alone. When including data from earlier in the pandemic, the losses are expected to be in the vicinity of $323 billion, and half of the nation’s hospitals are expected to be in the red by the end of the year.
Doug Wolfe, cofounder and managing partner of Miami-based law firm Wolfe Pincavage, said this has amounted to a “double-whammy” for hospitals, because on top of elective procedures being cancelled, the money healthcare facilities received from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act was an advance on future Medicare payments – which is coming due. While hospitals perform fewer procedures, they will now have to start paying that money back.
All hospitals are hurting, but some are in a more precarious position than others.
“Some hospital systems have had more cash on hand and more liquidity to withstand some of the financial pressure some systems are facing,” said Wolfe. “Traditionally, the smaller hospital systems in the healthcare climate we face today have faced a lot more financial pressure. They’re not able to control costs the same way as a big system. The smaller hospitals and systems were hurting to begin with.”
LOWER REVENUE, HIGHER COSTS
Some hospitals, especially ones in hot spots, are seeing a surge in COVID-19 patients. While this has kept frontline healthcare workers scrambling to care for scores of sick Americans, COVID-19 treatments are not reimbursed at the same level as surgeries. Hospital capacity is being stretched with less lucrative services.
“Some hospitals may be filling up right now, but they’re filling up with lower-reimbursing volume,” said Wolfe. “Inpatient stuff is lower reimbursement. It’s really the perfect storm for hospitals.”
John Haupert, CEO of Grady Health in Atlanta, Georgia, said this week that COVID-19 has had about a $115 million negative impact on Grady’s bottom line. Some $70 million of that is related to the reduction in the number of elective surgeries performed, as well as dips in emergency department and ambulatory visits.
During one week in March, Grady saw a 50% reduction in surgeries and a 38% reduction in ER visits. The system is almost back to even in terms of elective and essential surgeries, but due to a COVID-19 surge currently taking place in Georgia, it has had to suspend those services once again. ER visits have only come back about halfway from that initial 38% dip, and the system is currently operating at 105% occupancy.
“Part of what we’re seeing there is reluctance from patients to come to hospitals or seek services,” said Haupert. “Many have significantly exacerbated chronic disease conditions.”
Patient hesitation has been an ongoing problem, as has the associated cost of treating coronavirus patients, said Wolfe.
“When they were ramping up to resume the elective stuff, there was a problem getting patients comfortable,” he said. “And the other thing was that the cost of treating patients in this environment has gone up. They’ve put up plexiglass everywhere, they have more wiping-down procedures, and all of these things add cost and time. They need to add more time between procedures so they can clean everything … so they’re able to do less, and it costs more to do less. Even when elective procedures do resume, it’s not going back to the way it was.”
Most hospitals have adjusted their costs to mitigate some of the financial hit. Even some larger systems, such as 92-hospital nonprofit Trinity Health in Michigan, have taken to measures such as laying off and furloughing workers and scaling back working hours for some of its staff. At the top of the month, Trinity announced another round of layoffs and furloughs – in addition to the 2,500 furloughs it announced in April – citing a projected $2 billion in revenue losses in fiscal year 2021, which began on June 1.
Hospitals are at the mercy of the market at the moment, and Wolfe anticipates there could be an uptick in mergers and consolidation as organizations look to partner with less cash-strapped entities.
“Whether reorganization will work remains to be seen, but there will definitely be a fallout from this,” he said.
EXCLUSIVE: WHITE HOUSE PRIVATELY WARNS 11 CITIES MUST TAKE “AGGRESSIVE” ACTION AGAINST CORONAVIRUS
Exclusive: White House privately warns 11 cities must take ‘aggressive’ action against coronavirus
New red flags about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak come after Trump focused on upsides in televised briefing.
Dr. Deborah Birx, a leader of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, warned state and local leaders in a private phone call Wednesday that 11 major cities are seeing increases in the percentage of tests coming back positive for COVID-19 and should take “aggressive” steps to mitigate their outbreaks.
The cities she identified were Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.
The call was yet another private warning about the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreaks given to local officials but not the public at large. It came less than a week after the Center for Public Integrity revealed that the White House compiled a detailed report showing 18 states were in the “red zone” for coronavirus cases but did not release it publicly.
Increasing test positivity — an indicator that a community does not have an outbreak under control — should be expected in areas that reopened and grew more relaxed about social distancing measures, said Harvard epidemiologist Bill Hanage. He said the warnings and data from the White House should be made public.
“This is a pandemic. You cannot hide it under the carpet,” he said. “The best way to deal with a crisis or a natural disaster is to be straight with people, to earn their trust and to give the information they need to make decisions for themselves and their communities.”
Birx told hundreds of emergency managers and other state and local leaders that they should act quickly to stem the outbreaks. Among her recommendations were to trace the contacts of patients testing positive for COVID-19 in areas where test positivity is going up.
“When you first see that increase in test positivity, that is when to start the mitigation efforts,” she said in a recording obtained by Public Integrity. “I know it may look small and you may say, ‘That only went from 5 to 5-and-a-half [percent], and we’re gonna wait and see what happens.’ If you wait another three or four or even five days, you’ll start to see a dramatic increase in cases.”
Birx said the federal government was seeing encouraging declines in test positivity in places like Phoenix and San Antonio but warned that the outbreak in the Sunbelt was moving north.
“What started out very much as a southern and western epidemic is starting to move up the East Coast into Tennessee, Arkansas, up into Missouri, up across Colorado, and obviously we’re talking about increases now in Baltimore,” she said. “So this is really critical that everybody is following this and making sure they’re being aggressive about mitigation efforts.”
It’s unclear who heard the warnings and was invited to the call, which was hosted by the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and closed to the press. Baltimore and Cleveland were two of the cities Birx warned were facing rising test positivity, but a spokeswoman for the Cleveland mayor’s office, Nancy Kelsey-Carroll, said they did not participate in the call. And Baltimore health department leaders didn’t know about it, agency spokesman Adam Abadir said in an email. That city today announced a mask mandate and new restrictions on indoor dining.
The test positivity rates may not have been news to some elected officials. For example, Pennsylvania already publicly reports that data by county.
Birx’s warning came a day after President Donald Trump resumed his televised coronavirus briefings. The president offered a rosier picture of the pandemic than Birx, focusing on examples of improvements in the fight against the virus, such as better treatment with the drug remdesivir.
Her call also came the same day that Democratic Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor that he and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi had insisted on greater data transparency in a meeting with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Schumer said they would push for legislation to “ensure that COVID-19 data is fully transparent and accessible without any interference from the administration.”
And on Tuesday, former CDC Director Tom Frieden and colleagues released a list of data points they would like states to publish in real-time, standardized, to give officials and residents better information.
“It’s not just people who are holding office who need to make decisions,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, on a call with reporters. “The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we’ll be.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Birx’s warnings, nor did it answer repeated questions over several days from Public Integrity on why it had not made the “red zone” report public. Birx said on the call that the weekly report had been sent to governors for four weeks. One staffer for a governor said his boss received only the section of the report related to his state, not the entire report.
Cartoon – Pandemic Employee Incentives
Increasing unemployment alters national payer mix
https://mailchi.mp/9075526b5806/the-weekly-gist-july-24-2020?e=d1e747d2d8
One in every five workers is now collecting unemployment benefits as the country struggles to get the COVID-19 outbreak under control. A recent Families USA study estimates a quarter of the 21.9M workers that were furloughed or laid off between February and May lost their health insurance. And the payer mix will continue to change as the pandemic wears on.
The graphic below highlights a study from consultancy Oliver Wyman, looking at the impact of rising unemployment (at 15, 20 and 30 percent) on insurance coverage. With each five to ten percent rise in unemployment, the commercially insured population decreases by three to five percent. Those who lose employer-sponsored insurance either remain uninsured, buy coverage on the Obamacare marketplaces, or qualify for Medicaid.
Surprisingly, Washington State and California are reporting little to no enrollment growth in Medicaid programs thus far. Experts point to lack of outreach and consumer awareness as key contributors to the slow growth—but Medicaid enrollment will likely begin to rise quickly in coming months as temporary furloughs convert to more permanent layoffs.
The right side of the graphic spotlights the growing number of uninsured individuals in those states with the highest uninsured rates. The previous record for the largest increase in uninsured adults was between 2008 and 2009, when nearly 4M lost coverage. The current pandemic-driven increase has crushed that record by 39 percent.
On average, states are seeing uninsured populations increase by two percent, with some as high as five percent. And the two states with the highest uninsured rates, Florida and Texas, are also dealing with the largest surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths. The ranks of the uninsured will continue to climb as states reimpose shutdowns, government assistance ends, and layoffs grow.
Grim statistics mount in the battle with COVID
https://mailchi.mp/9075526b5806/the-weekly-gist-july-24-2020?e=d1e747d2d8
It was a week of unhappy milestones in the nation’s battle with the coronavirus. On Thursday, the US crossed the threshold of 4M confirmed COVID cases, just 15 days after it hit the 3M cases mark. That’s three times as fast as it took to go from 2M to 3M cases, with daily new case counts now hovering near 70,000.
As the virus proliferates across the country, California has now overtaken New York as the epicenter of the outbreak, with more than 422,000 total cases reported since the beginning of the pandemic, versus New York’s 413,000.
Of greater concern, the daily US death toll from COVID stayed stubbornly above 1,000 for most of the week, the highest it’s been since late May. More Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID than at any time since the middle of April, with the Gulf Coast states showing some of the highest per-capita hospitalization rates in the country. For good reason, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar officially renewed the Trump administration’s declaration of a public health emergency for another 90 days, clearing the way for the nation’s hospitals to receive more emergency financial assistance in battling the virus, and for continued relaxation of regulations that have allowed them to provide care virtually, and in non-traditional settings.
Meanwhile, as part of its Operation Warp Speed initiative to accelerate the development of a COVID vaccine, the Trump administration inked a $1.95B deal with pharmaceutical firm Pfizer and a German biotech company, BioNTech, to purchase 100M doses of the vaccine those companies are developing, with an option to buy an additional 500M doses. That’s in addition to contracts already in place to purchase 100M doses of a vaccine from Novavax, and 300M doses from AstraZeneca.
Americans would have free access to the Pfizer vaccine under the new arrangement, with the government subsidizing the entire cost of each dose, estimated to be about $19.50. Similar deals struck by the British government with AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline carry a much lower per dose price tag—between $4 and $10—raising concerns of “profiteering” by pharmaceutical companies in the US vaccine hunt.
The forward purchasing of millions of doses, coupled with rapid progress on vaccine development (at least 25 of the 150 potential vaccines being developed are already in human trials), raises hopes that help is on the way in our battle with the virus. On Friday, however, top White House science advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said that he doesn’t expect a vaccine to be “widely available” to the American public until the second half of next year. Until then, our hand-to-hand combat with the virus—using non-pharmaceutical interventions such as mask wearing, social distancing, hand hygiene, testing, and contact tracing—must intensify, particularly in light of increasingly worrisome data on the spread and impact of the disease.
US coronavirus update: 4.0M cases; 144K deaths; 48.8M tests conducted.
HENRY KOTULA 