Here’s our personal bellwether for how the Delta variant is impacting health systems:we’ve had three different, in-person leadership retreats cancel across the course of the past week, due to COVID concerns. Three very different parts of the country, on both coasts and in the heartland.
Case counts are up, hospitalizations are up, and clinical leaders are (rightly) becoming more skittish about large, in-person meetings. As many have noted, this latest wave of infections is unevenly distributed across the country, primarily affecting the unvaccinated but also putting vaccinated people at risk of transmitting the virus or becoming ill.
As frequent business travelers who thrive on meeting face-to-face with our members, we had just begun to get comfortable being back out “on the road”—but now that’s changing, too. The recent cancellations are a good reminder that we’re still in a fluid situation in this pandemic, and that being flexible and adaptable will continue to be critical for the foreseeable future. (Thank goodness we’re not in the conference business—that’s got to be a nightmare right now.)
Just as we always check the weather forecast for places we’re traveling to, we’ve started checking the number of cases per 100,000 and the test positivity rate as well—over 10 per 100,000, or over 5 percent, and we’ll think twice about visiting.
And our masks have gone back on. We’ll hope to see you out there soon, but in the meantime—stay safe and get vaccinated!
With the Delta variant now accounting for more than 83 percent of all new COVID cases in the US, daily new case counts more than quadrupling across the month of July, and hospitalizations—particularly in states with low vaccination rates—beginning to climb significantly, we appear to have entered a new and uncertain phase of the pandemic, now being dubbed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.
Welcome news, then, that this week the American Hospital Association (AHA) publicly encouraged its members to put in place vaccine mandates for their employees. While several large health systems have taken the lead in implementing vaccine mandates, including Trinity Health, the Livonia, MI-based Catholic system that operates hospitals across 22 states, Phoenix, AZ-based Banner Health, Houston Methodist in Texas, and the academic giant NewYork-Presbyterian, others have been more reticent to compel employees to get vaccinated, citing concerns over employee privacy and the potential for workforce backlash.
The New York Timesreports that a quarter of all hospital employees remain unvaccinated nationwide, with many facilities reporting that more than half of their healthcare workers have not gotten the COVID vaccine. In our discussions with health system executives, one consideration frequently cited is the desire for full Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the new vaccines before mandates are put in place.
In a CNN town hall meeting this week, President Biden suggested that approval could come as soon as the end of August, although other reports point to likely approval much later, potentially not until January of next year. Facing a new variant of the virus that is much more transmissible and possibly more virulent than earlier strains, hospitals—and their patients—can’t afford to wait that long.
For safety’s sake, hospitals should quickly put in place vaccine mandates, with appropriate exceptions.
Unemployment claims jumped last week, as the delta variant of the coronavirus sparked rising caseloads around the country and renewed fears about the potential for more restrictions and business closures.
The number of new claims grew to 419,000 from 368,000, the third time in six weeks that they had ticked up, according to data from the Department of Labor.
Economists said the uptick was concerning but cautioned that it was too early to tell whether it was a one week aberration or telegraphed a more concerning turn for the labor market.
“The unexpected bump in claims could be noise in the system, but it’s also not hard to see how the rise of the covid-19 delta variant could add thousands of layoffs to numbers that already are double what they were pre-Covid,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union.
Overall, unemployment numbers have been falling gradually from the peaks at other stages of the pandemic, but they are still well above pre-pandemic averages.
The jobless numbers have provided a jarring catalogue about the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic — spiking to records as the pandemic unfolded in March 2020, and remaining at historic high levels throughout most of 2020.
The coronavirus surge last fall helped precipitate a rise in claims that saw the labor market, as seen in the monthly jobs report, slide backward too.
But until recently, the last few months been marked by strong jobs growth and a sense of optimism as vaccinations picked up, giving economists hope that the country was back on track to recovering the nearly 7 million jobs it is still down from before the pandemic.
Now, the delta variant is driving an alarming increase in covid-19 cases around the country, according to public health officials: the number of new cases increased more than 40 percent in the last week, sending jitters through the stock market, and is raising questions about whether state and local health authorities will reinstitute restrictions to slow the virus’ spread.
Frick said that the report showed the potential for unemployment claims to start trending upward after months of steady declines.
“There’s definitely a correlation, however loose, that the rise in covid does cause a rise in claims,” he said. “My fear is that the rise in the delta variant could cause claims to go back up…Certainly one week doesn’t show that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see claims rise.”
However, there are also lots of signs that the economy continues to rebound despite rising caseloads.
The more than 2.2 million people that the Transportation Security Administration said it screened at airports on Sunday was the most since late February 2020 — and nearly three times the amount it was on the same day last year.
Restaurant dining has largely rebounded in recent months, at times surpassing the levels from before the pandemic — on Saturday the number of diners was 1 percent higher than the same day in 2019, according to data from Open Table.
Last week, some 12.5 million claims were filed for unemployment insurance overall, according to the most recent numbers — down from 32.9 million filed at the same point last year.
Nevada, Rhode Island and California topped the list of states with the highest number of people on unemployment, the Labor Department said.
Economic concerns in recent months have been more focused on the ways that workers are still held back from filling some of the more than 9 million job openings in the country, than unemployment, with high hopes that school re-openings in the fall will help many parents get back into the labor force.
Forty percent of all new cases this week have been recorded in Florida, Texas and Missouri, White House pandemic response coordinator Jeff Zients revealed at a press briefingThursday.
Florida alone accounts for 20 percent of all new cases nationally, Zients pointed out, a trend that has stretched into its second week.
Zients added that “virtually all” hospitalizations and deaths — a full 97 percent — are among unvaccinated people. “The threat is now predominantly only to the unvaccinated,” he said. A few vaccinated people do experience so-called breakthrough infections, but they tend to experience only mild COVID-19 illness, or no illness at all.
Encouragingly, Zients said the five states that have experienced the most significant rise in infections — Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, Nevada and Missouri — all also saw vaccination rates beat the national average for a second week in a row. But because immunity takes two weeks to develop, and the Delta variant spreads so rapidly, the benefits of the increased uptake of vaccinations may not be evident right away.
Singling out the three states where infections are now spiking could have the effect of putting pressure on elected officials there to do more to encourage vaccinations.
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a Donald Trump loyalist who is widely expected to seek the presidency in 2024. His handling of the pandemic is coming under new scrutiny with the recent rise in cases.
As the pandemic has surged back in parts of the country, other Republicans have deviated from that approach. The governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson — a Republican who, like DeSantis and Abbott, is rumored to have presidential ambitions of his own — has recently pushed for more vaccinations in his state.
Rep. Steve Scalise, a member of Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and a close Trump ally, rolled up his sleeve last Sunday and was vaccinated. Scalise represents a district in Louisiana, another state with a low rate of vaccination that is experiencing a surge in new cases.
There were 46,318 new cases of the coronavirus reported nationwide on Tuesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said at Thursday’s briefing. That is a marked increase from the lows of late May and early June. Hospitalizations and deaths are also rising, after plummeting earlier this summer.
“If you are not vaccinated,” Walensky said, “please take the Delta variant seriously.”
HENRY KOTULA 