This map shows the risk level of attending an event, given the event size and location.
The risk level is the estimated chance (0-100%) that at least 1 COVID-19 positive individual will be present at an event in a county, given the size of the event.
Based on seroprevalence data, we assume there are ten times more cases than are being reported (10:1 ascertainment bias). In places with more testing availability, that rate may be lower.
Choose an event size and ascertainment bias below:
Sure, none of that is certain, but Monday morning’s news that at least 14 members of the Miami Marlins and their staff have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in recent days was a Category 5 covid-19 hurricane alert. You couldn’t have a worse MLB start or a grimmer predictor for other games.
With lots of inherent social distancing, baseball was supposed to be the easiest major American team sport to resume, just as leagues in Japan and South Korea have functioned smoothly for months. But MLB couldn’t go even a week without the serious prospect that its 60-game season should be canceled.
“Hey, I’m going to be honest with you: I’m scared. I really am,” said Washington Nationals Manager Dave Martinez, 55, who has a heart condition.
Why is MLB creating a situation where Dusty Baker, 71, the survivor of multiple life-threatening conditions in the past 15 years, manages Houston every day while Texas is a national coronavirus hot spot?
Martinez added that before long his team may see more players “opt out,” as Ryan Zimmerman and Joe Ross already have. Once the defections start, the cascade won’t stop until the sport must call a halt.
“Now we REALLY get to see if MLB is going to put players health first,” tweeted Los Angeles Dodgers left-hander David Price, who passed on $11.8 million by opting out of this partial season. “Remember when [Commissioner Rob] Manfred said players health was PARAMOUNT?! Part of the reason I’m at home right now is because players health wasn’t being put first. I can see that hasn’t changed.”
Underneath all the discussions and elaborate plans to reopen various sports — MLB, the NBA and NHL now, and the NFL and college football by the end of next month — has been one naive assumption: If the virus hit a team, it would infect one or two players. Maybe three. But the sense was things still would be manageable. You could still field a team.
When did this become the highest of all human goals?
The danger and the damage would not be “too bad.” In this, we see Americans’ national tendency toward willful pandemic ignorance being played out on a small, crystal-clear stage so everyone can get the message.
For months, we have watched healthy people, mostly young, swarm into bars or hit the beaches with an apparent sense that community spread was a fiction or not something that applied to them. Maybe, the fantasy went, one person in the wrong bar would get the virus.
Now we learn differently. Now we see the truth.
Over a dozen Marlins and counting.
The immediate consequences of the Marlins’ outbreak were the postponements of their home opener against the Baltimore Orioles and the Philadelphia Phillies’ home game against the New York Yankees, who would have been occupying the clubhouse those Marlins just showered and dressed in Sunday.
The wider effect: Back to normal, or even semi-normal, in sports was shattered just days after being reintroduced.
What does this mean?
Some events have ambiguous consequences. We won’t know their impact for some time. But in rare cases, one event may have enormous impact, just as the positive virus test for the NBA’s Rudy Gobert in mid-March resulted in the shutdown of every major sport within 48 hours.
This is such a moment — but perhaps bigger.
Why are we here? The answer is simple yet inexplicably unacknowledged in wide swaths of this country: The pandemic is not under control until you stop it, suppress it, dominate it and crush the curve.
Though many other countries have done it, America has not come within a million miles of that outcome.
As I pointed out in a column last week, when a league says, Given what we are seeing with covid-19 hitting our teams, maybe we should cancel the season, the correct response is “get rid of the word ‘maybe.’ ”
The entire American experience of this pandemic has been: Don’t embolden the virus by acknowledging its threat. Try to outrun it, hide from it, say it’s not so bad and will go away.
That just breeds a disaster, and now that disaster has hit MLB just days into its season. The Cincinnati Reds also have multiple positive tests. The Atlanta Braves have been without two catchers who have symptoms, though no positive tests. Nationals star Juan Soto is inactive after a positive test.
Do we need a longer list?
You can’t be much healthier, as a group, than a pro baseball team. You can’t be much better protected or tested more often than an MLB team. The Marlins are close to the safest possible case. And now, less than a week into their season, at least half of the team has the coronavirus!
That is what is meant by “community spread.” That is what is meant by an “outbreak” in an epidemic. All of us have worried that one or two players — or people in the MLB community — would have bad outcomes from the virus if a 60-game season was played. Time to blow up that assumption. If half of the Marlins team can test positive within a few days, then the scale of danger to health — the number of people who may get sick and the severity of the damage they may suffer, including prime-of-life pro athletes — just shot through the ceiling.
Our assumptions, while well-intentioned, have been blown to pieces. And in short order, so will the season of one, or perhaps several, of our sports.
The Marlins are just the latest — but one of the most vivid — illustrations of what America is facing. And how little we are willing to take seriously the true measure of our fearsome enemy.
After spending a May day preparing her classroom to reopen for preschoolers, Ana Aguilar was informed that the tots would not have to wear face masks when they came back. What’s more, she had to sign a form agreeing not to sue the school if she caught COVID-19 or suffered any injury from it while working there.
Other teachers signed the form distributed by the Montessori Schools of Irvine, but Aguilar said she felt uncomfortable, although it stipulated that staff members would be masked. At 23, she has a compromised immune system and was also worried that she could pass the coronavirus on to her fiancé and other family members.
Aguilar refused to sign, and a week later she was fired. “They said it was my choice to sign the paper, but it wasn’t really my choice,” said Aguilar, who’s currently jobless and receiving $276 a week in unemployment benefits. “I felt so bullied.”
As employers in California and across the country ask employees to return to the workplace, many have considered and some are requiring employees to sign similar waivers, employment lawyers say. And many employees, mostly lower-wage and minority workers in essential jobs, are calling lawyers to complain about the waivers.
“These are illegal agreements that are totally unfair to workers,” said Christian Schreiber, a San Francisco lawyer who represents Aguilar and other employees.
The California State Legislature last year passed a law, AB-51, prohibiting employers from requiring employees or job applicants to sign away their right to pursue legal claims or benefits under state law. The law, which also prohibits firing any employee for refusing to sign, is being challenged in court by business groups.
Only a few employers have forced employees to sign liability waivers, at least partly because these waivers likely would be held unenforceable by courts, lawyers who represent employers say.
“Courts don’t recognize them because of the unequal bargaining power between employers and employees,” said Isaac Mamaysky, a partner at the Potomac Law Group in New York City. “With so many unemployed, people would sign just about anything to get a job.”
Another reason they are considered unenforceable: Workers who get sick or injured on the job generally are compensated through state workers’ compensation systems rather than through the courts, and state laws don’t allow employers to force employees to sign away their right to pursue workers’ comp claims, Mamaysky said.
Companies may have the right to require nonemployees working on their premises to sign COVID waivers. When the New York Stock Exchange reopened in late May, it made floor traders sign a form clearing the exchange of liability if they contracted COVID-19. That was legally permissible because the traders were not exchange employees, an NYSE spokesman said. He declined to say whether any traders have become infected with the virus.
The Las Vegas-based restaurant chain Nacho Daddy, which did require employees to surrender their right to sue over COVID-19, reportedly fired some who refused. Following negative media coverage, Nacho Daddy removed the language that waived legal rights and instead had employees agree to follow safety rules such as masking and social distancing. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Having employees agree to comply with safety rules is a more common and legally acceptable approach than waivers.
“I suggest my clients go to this reasonable middle ground: Here’s what we promise to you, here’s what we want you to promise to us,” said David Barron, an employment lawyer with Cozen O’Connor in Houston.
Business groups hope Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will make liability waivers unnecessary. He has proposed a Senate bill with broad liability protection for employers for five years against a range of coronavirus-related claims, and says he won’t back any COVID relief bill that doesn’t include such protections. President Donald Trump has said he supports the liability protection.
At least 10 states already have enacted laws providing some form of immunity for businesses from lawsuits brought by employees and others who contract COVID-19. Similar bills are pending in about 10 more states, according to the National Employment Law Project. The California Assembly is considering a liability protection bill for public K-12 schools.
Federal legislation to provide COVID liability relief for employers should protect only those that follow applicable health and safety guidelines, said John Abegg, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, which supports McConnell’s proposal.
But even if McConnell is able to overcome Democratic opposition and pass liability protection as part of a new pandemic economic relief bill, that still wouldn’t shield employers from lawsuits claiming gross negligence or reckless or intentional conduct in failing to implement COVID-19 safety precautions.
Across the country, hospitals and nursing homes, as well as companies like McDonald’s, Walmart and Safeway, have been hit with wrongful death lawsuits filed by families of employees who died from the virus. They typically cite egregious conduct that goes beyond ordinary negligence, potentially erasing any statutory liability relief.
Nearly 50 COVID-related lawsuits have been filed relating to conditions of employment, including exposure to the coronavirus or the lack of protective equipment, according to data collected by the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth.
In many states, alleging intentional misconduct also may allow workers harmed by COVID-19, and their families, to file lawsuits rather than go through the workers’ compensation system, and thus seek bigger damage awards.
For instance, a suit filed in Alameda County Superior Court in June by the widow of a longtime employee of Safeway’s distribution center in Tracy, California, alleged that the company had concealed a COVID-19 outbreak from workers and informed them that personal protective equipment was not recommended, contrary to guidelines from federal and state authorities.
“I don’t know of any jurisdiction that would allow a waiver against intentional misconduct,” said Louis DiLorenzo, head of the labor and employment practice for Bond Schoeneck & King in New York, who represents employers. “That would encourage misconduct.”
Worker advocates argue that lawsuits like the one against Safeway should be encouraged — rather than blocked by waivers or immunity laws — to bring to light serious public safety problems. Cases against McDonald’s in Oakland and Chicago — in which workers claimed the restaurants had created a “public nuisance” by not taking steps to adequately protect workers and customers from COVID-19 — resulted in court orders in late June for those McDonald’s restaurants to implement safety measures such as masks, social distancing and temperature checks.
“A very tiny number of cases are being filed by workers, and those cases are valuable,” said Hugh Baran, a staff lawyer at the National Employment Law Project. “These are the kinds of claims we should want workers to bring.”
Schreiber said he contacted the Montessori school about Aguilar’s firing, and it offered to reinstate her without having her sign the waiver. But Aguilar declined, saying the school was putting teachers at risk by not requiring pupils to wear masks. The school then offered her six weeks of severance pay, which she is considering.
By refusing to sign the waiver or accept her job back, she said, she was standing up for all the teachers at the school, many of whom have children and can’t afford to lose their job.
“I liked my job and I needed the paycheck,” Aguilar said. “But making you sign these papers is telling you that whatever happens, they really don’t care.”
https://khn.org/news/khn-podcast-what-the-health-trump-twists-on-virus-response/
President Donald Trump — who has spent the past six months trying to play down the coronavirus pandemic — seems to have pivoted. In back-to-back briefings on July 21 and 22, Trump cautioned that the U.S. is in a dangerous place vis-a-vis the pandemic. He urged the public to wear masks — although he has rarely worn one in public.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate are scrambling to put together a package for the next COVID-19 relief bill, facing a July 31 deadline, when some of the benefits passed in the spring expire. House Democrats passed their bill in May.
This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Joanne Kenen of Politico, Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times and Tami Luhby of CNN.
Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:
https://khn.org/news/dental-and-doctors-offices-still-struggling-with-covid-job-loss/
California’s outpatient health care practices largely shrugged off two recessions, adding more than 400,000 jobs during a two-decade climb from the start of 2000 to early 2020. It was an enviable growth rate of 85% and a trend largely mirrored on the national level.
Then came COVID-19.
Anecdotal stories abound about the crushing impact the pandemic has had on a range of outpatient medical services, from pediatric and family medical practices to dental offices, medical labs and home health care. In California, as in many other states, thousands of doctors, dentists and other health care providers temporarily closed offices this spring as state health officials directed them to suspend non-urgent visits. Many others sat open but largely idle because patients were too scared to visit the doctor given the risk of running into someone with COVID-19 in the waiting room.
As the economy has reopened, so have many medical offices. But the latest state and federal employment data underscores the lingering toll the pandemic has taken on the health care sector.
In California, and across the nation, the number of workers in doctors’ offices grew by more than 50% in the past 20 years, before seeing rapid declines amid COVID-19. This chart shows proportional growth in employment over time, with percentages relative to January 2000.
In California, employment in medical offices providing an array of outpatient care fell by 159,300 jobs, or 18%, from February to April, according to California’s Employment Development Department. The sector has recovered some, but job totals in June remained 7% below pre-crisis levels, the latest figures show. Data is not yet available for July, when COVID-19 cases in California again began to rise sharply and communities across much of the state reverted to partial shutdowns.
Nationwide, employment in outpatient care fell by about 1.3 million jobs, or 17%, from February to April, and in June also remained 7% below pre-crisis levels.
Doctors’ offices typically rely on patient volume for revenue. Without it, they can’t make payroll. Many small medical clinics weren’t flush with cash before the crisis, making COVID-19 an existential threat.
“Never in our history have we had more than a month’s cash on hand,” said Dr. Sumana Reddy, owner of the Acacia Family Medical Group in Monterey County. “Think of it that way.”
Reddy operates two clinics, one in Salinas and the other in the town of Prunedale. Many of her clients come from rural areas where poverty is common. When COVID-19 hit and stay-at-home orders took effect, the number of patients coming to the practice fell by about 50%, Reddy said. To keep her patients safe and her business afloat, Reddy largely shifted to telehealth so she could provide care online.
She also turned to federal aid. “I took the stimulus money,” she said. “I asked for advances from anywhere I could get that. So, now I’m tapped out. I’ve done every single thing that I can think of to do. And there’s nothing more to do.”
By late June, patient volume at Reddy’s practice stood at roughly 70% of the level seen before the crisis.
The coronavirus pandemic prompted steep declines in dental office employment, undoing 20 years of steady growth. This chart shows proportional growth in dental employment over time, with percentages relative to January 2000.
Many dental offices have been hit even harder. From February to April, the number of dental office employees in California fell by 85,000, or 60%, a rate of decline that outpaced even job losses in the state’s restaurant industry. Nationwide, dental employment fell by about 546,000 from February to April, a 56% decline.
“March, April, mid-May — we were pretty much closed except for emergency care,” said Dr. Natasha Lee, who owns Better Living Through Dentistry, a practice in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood. “While dental offices were considered essential, most were closed due to guidance from health departments and the CDC to postpone routine and preventative medical and dental care and just to limit things to emergency.”
Lee has reopened her clinic but is doing less business. She and her staff need extra time to clean tools and change their personal protective equipment.
“With the social distancing, the limiting [of] patients in the office at a time and the slowdown we’ve had, we’re probably seeing about, I’d say, two-thirds of our normal capacity in our practice,” she said in late June.
As for employment, California hospitals have fared better than outpatient medical offices. Hospitals shed about 2% of jobs from February to June.
“They have more capacity in a large organization to withstand the same shock,” said John Romley, a professor and economist at the University of Southern California’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
Romley said he is optimistic the health care sector overall will recover faster than some other sectors of the economy, since health care remains a necessity.
Still, red flags abound. The recent spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths in many parts of the nation raises the specter of future shutdowns and, with them, additional health care layoffs. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently ordered a second shutdown for dine-in restaurants, movie theaters and bars statewide, as well as churches, gyms and barbershops in much of the state. For now, dental and doctors’ offices can continue operating.
A recent census survey found that 42% of California respondents had put off medical care because of the pandemic.
But it’s uncertain when patients will feel comfortable returning to the doctor for routine and preventive care. A series of Census Bureau surveys conducted between June 11 and July 7 found that 42% of Californians who responded had put off medical care in the previous four weeks because of the pandemic. About 33% said they needed medical care for something unrelated to COVID-19 but did not get it.
“I’ve been telling my staff and patients that we should prepare for things to stay not too different for six months to a year,” Reddy said, “which is pretty depressing for most people to think about.”
Led by physicians, scientists and epidemiologists, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is one of the most reliable sources of knowledge during disease outbreaks. But now, with the world in desperate need of authoritative information, one of the foremost agencies for fighting infectious disease has gone conspicuously silent.
For the first time since 1946, when the CDC came to life in a cramped Atlanta office to fight malaria, the agency is not at the front line of a public health emergency.
On April 22, CDC director Robert Redfield stood at the White House briefing room lectern and conceded that the coronavirus pandemic had “overwhelmed” the United States. Following Redfield at the podium, President Donald Trump said the CDC director had been “totally misquoted” in his warning that COVID-19 would continue to pose serious difficulties as the US moved into its winter ‘flu season in late 2020.
Invited to clarify, Redfield confirmed he had been quoted correctly in giving his opinion that there were potentially “difficult and complicated” times ahead.
Trump tried a different tack. “You may not even have corona coming back,” the president said, once again contradicting the career virologist. “Just so you understand.”
The exchange was interpreted by some pundits as confirmation that the CDC’s venerated expertise had been sidelined as the coronavirus continued to ravage the US.
In the latest development, the New York Times reported this week the CDC has even been bypassed in its data collection, with the Trump administration ordering hospitals to send COVID-19 data directly to the White House.
When facing previous public health emergencies the CDC was a hive of activity, holding regular press briefings and developing guidance that was followed by governments around the world. But during the greatest public health emergency in a century, it appears the CDC has been almost entirely erased by the White House as the public face of the COVID-19 pandemic response.
This diminished role is obvious to former leaders of the CDC, who say their scientific advice has never before been politicised to this extent.
As the COVID-19 crisis was unfolding, several CDC officials issued warnings, only to promptly disappear from public view. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, predicted on February 25 that the virus was not contained and would grow into a pandemic.
The stock market plunged and Messonnier was removed from future White House press briefings. Between March 9 and June 12 there was no CDC presence at White House press briefings on COVID-19.
The CDC has erred during the pandemic, most significantly in its initial efforts to develop a test for COVID-19. The testing kits proved to be faulty – a problem compounded by sluggish efforts to rectify the situation – and then by severe delays in distributing enough tests to the public.
But many public health specialists are nevertheless baffled by the CDC’s low profile as the pandemic continues to sweep the globe.
“They have been sidelined,” said Howard Koh, former US assistant secretary for health. “We need their scientific leadership right now.”
The CDC being bypassed in the collection of COVID-19 data is another body blow to the agency’s standing.
Hospitals have instead been ordered to send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington DC.
This will have a range of likely knock-on effects. For starters, the new database will not be available to the public, prompting inevitable questions over the accuracy and transparency of data which will now be interpreted and shared by the White House.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which issued the new order, says the change will help the White House’s coronavirus task force allocate resources. But epidemiologists and public health experts around the world fear the new system will make it harder for people outside the White House to track the pandemic or access information.
This affects all nations, because one of the CDC’s roles is to provide sound, independent public health guidance on issues such as infectious diseases, healthy living, travel health, emergency and disaster preparedness, and drug efficacy. Other jurisdictions can then adapt this information to their local context — expertise that has become even more essential during a pandemic, when uncertainty is the norm.
It is difficult to recall a previous public health emergency when political pressure led to a change in the interpretation of scientific evidence.
Despite the inevitable challenges that come with tackling a pandemic in real time, the CDC remains the best-positioned agency – not just in the US but the entire world – to help us manage this crisis as safely as possible.
In the absence of US leadership, nations should start thinking about developing their own national centres for disease control. In Australia’s case, these discussions have been ongoing since the 1990s, stymied by cost and lack of political will.
COVID-19, and the current sidelining of the CDC, may be the impetus needed to finally dust off those plans and make them a reality.
HENRY KOTULA 