About the public’s health
White House moves toward promoting face masks to fight virus: “A person familiar with the White House coronavirus task force’s discussion said officials would suggest that nonmedical masks, T-shirts or bandannas be used to cover the nose and mouth people go outside — for instance, at the grocery store or pharmacy. Medical-grade masks, particularly short-in-supply N95 masks, would be reserved for those dealing directly with the sick.”
Australia Begins Testing COVID-19 Vaccines: “Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has begun pre-clinical research for potential COVID-19 vaccines.”
Trump to expand use of Defense Production Act to build ventilators: “Trump issued a memorandum allowing the secretary of Health and Human Services to use authority under the powerful Korean War-era law to help six companies, including General Electric and Medtronic, secure supplies to make ventilators.”
Experts tell White House coronavirus can spread through talking or even just breathing: On a related topic: “‘While the current [coronavirus] specific research is limited, the results of available studies are consistent with aerosolization of virus from normal breathing,’ according to the letter, written by Dr. Harvey Fineberg, chairman of a committee with the National Academy of Sciences.”
About healthcare personnel
43,000 healthcare jobs lost in March: “Healthcare lost 43,000 jobs in March, with job losses primarily in ambulatory healthcare services, according to the latest jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics….The job losses…included offices of physicians (-12,000), dentists (-17,000) and other healthcare practitioners (-7,000). At the same time, hospitals added only 200 jobs last month, compared to the 7,800 positions they added to the U.S. economy in February.”
U.S. doctors on coronavirus frontline seek protection from malpractice suits: Concerns range from physicians: practicing outside of their specialties (to cover excess cases) to operating hastily constructed equipment to sending people home from ERs to make room for COVID-19 patients.
Inside America’s mask crunch: A slow government reaction and an industry wary of liability: In a related story, manufacturers are wary of the liability from adapting their products to healthcare uses. For example, 3M makes masks for construction use but they are not medical grade (like N95 masks).
About healthcare IT
‘Zoom is malware’: why experts worry about the video conferencing platform: We are using Zoom and other conferencing software as never before. “But security researchers have called Zoom ‘a privacy disaster’ and ‘fundamentally corrupt’ as allegations of the company mishandling user data snowball.”
About health insurance
New York requires insurers to defer premium payments until June for individuals, small businesses facing financial hardship: The headline speaks for itself.
COVID-19 Impact on Medicaid, Marketplace, and the Uninsured, by State: Here are five take-aways from the study:
The number of people receiving coverage from an employer could decline by 12 to 35 million, including both workers and family members.
Medicaid enrollment could increase from 71 million to 82-94 million.
Medicaid enrollment could grow by 5 million regardless of the number of people who lose their jobs.
Uninsured numbers could increase to 40 million, with bigger impacts in non-expansion states.
Marketplaces will likely see both new entrants and attrition due to job loss.
Association Between Financial Incentives in Medicare's Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program and Hospital Readmission Performance: With regard to readmissions and Medicare, are penalties or rewards more useful incentives? “The findings suggest that improvements in readmission avoidance are more strongly associated with incentives from the HRRP than with aggregate penalty amounts, suggesting that the program has elicited sizeable changes. Worsened performance among hospitals with small or no incentives may indicate the need for reconsideration of the program's lack of financial rewards for high-performing hospitals.”
About pharma
COVID-19 is bad news for new drug launches. Which will suffer most?: As previously mentioned, the attention to COVID-19 has displaced work on many other areas of healthcare. This article discusses which drug launches will be delayed because of the pandemic.