About healthcare IT
New York is merging all its hospitals to battle the coronavirus: It takes a real crisis to advance interoperability. “Cuomo announced that he had met with New York hospital leaders and come up with a plan to, in effect, merge them into one operating system with many different locations. From Buffalo to NYC, hospitals will be sharing staff, patients, and supplies for the foreseeable future, with Albany overseeing the distribution of resources.”
About health insurance
The 27 telehealth services Aetna covers during COVID-19 and their codes: The headline speaks for itself.
Trump Says Hospitals Will Be Paid for Treating Uninsured Coronavirus Patients: “The Trump administration plans to use money from the recent stimulus bills to pay hospitals for treatment of uninsured coronavirus patients. It says the plan is more efficient than reopening enrollment in the Obamacare markets to achieve the same goal.”
About the public’s health
China sees rise in asymptomatic coronavirus cases: “The National Health Commission (NHC) said on Monday that 78 new asymptomatic cases had been identified as of the end of Sunday, compared with 47 the day before.
Imported cases and asymptomatic patients, who show no symptoms but can still pass the virus to others, have become China’s chief concern after draconian containment measures succeeded in slashing the overall infection rate.”
The blame game: the origins of Covid-19 and the anatomy of a fake news story: This article is an interesting, in-depth telling of how China spread fake news that SARS-CoV-2 came from the US and was introduced into China.
How sewage could reveal true scale of coronavirus outbreak: “More than a dozen research groups worldwide have started analysing wastewater for the new coronavirus as a way to estimate the total number of infections in a community, given that most people will not be tested. The method could also be used to detect the coronavirus if it returns to communities, say scientists. So far, researchers have found traces of the virus in the Netherlands, the United States and Sweden.”
Ignoring Expert Opinion, Trump Again Promotes Use of Hydroxychloroquine: From the NY Times: “Standing alongside two top public health officials who have declined to endorse his call for widely administering the drug, Mr. Trump suggested that he was speaking on gut instinct and acknowledged that he had no expertise on the subject…When a reporter at Sunday’s briefing asked Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to weigh in on the subject, Mr. Trump stopped him from answering. As the reporter noted that Dr. Fauci, who has been far more skeptical about the drug’s potential, was the president’s medical expert, Mr. Trump made it clear he did not want the doctor to answer.”
Fauci: no evidence anti-malaria drug Trump pushes works against virus: On the same topic: “Donald Trump’s top coronavirus adviser has warned again that there is no scientific evidence to support the use of an unproven anti-malaria drug the president has been pushing as a possible remedy for Covid-19.”
EU body backs compassionate use of Gilead's remdesivir for COVID-19: In a related article: “The European Medicines Agency (EMA) on Friday said its Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) recommended compassionate use of Gilead Sciences' investigational antiviral remdesivir to treat COVID-19. However, the agency cautioned that while remdesivir has been shown to be active against SARS-CoV-2 and other types of coronavirus in laboratory studies, there are ‘currently only limited data’ on its use for COVID‑19 patients.”
Some pharmacist licensing rules relaxed to fight COVID-19: “Some of the biggest regulation changes include allowing remote work, giving pharmacists more autonomy to handle certain prescriptions and allowing pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to practice out-of-state.”
E-cigarette Product Characteristics and Subsequent Frequency of Cigarette Smoking: “Among baseline past-30-day e-cigarette users, participants who used mods [modifiable electronic cigarettes] (versus vape pens) smoked >6 times as many cigarettes at follow-up… Regulation of e-cigarette device type warrants consideration as a strategy to reduce cigarette smoking among adolescents and young adults who vape.”
Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report: While COVID-19 is on everyone’s minds, we should not forget the impact of influenza. The “CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 39 million flu illnesses, 400,000 hospitalizations and 24,000 deaths from flu.” The good news is that: “Almost all (>99%) of the influenza viruses tested this season are susceptible to the four FDA-approved influenza antiviral medications recommended for use in the U.S. this season.”