I needed to let everyone know that telehealth is a scam and also that it is doing more harm than good. It doesn’t help care for many of our patients and is there to make money, first for the technology companies and also to bring in revenues for the physicians during this pandemic. They are taking advantage of our patient’s fears and the physicians who are in a bind not “allowed” to see their patients and therefore not able to bill the insurance companies. But as we have found out, both in our families needing care, our friends and our patients, that not all insurers are paying for these services and if paid the rate of payment is so poor and yes, it will end soon. Then what?

This week in fact, I had to see 3 patients whose cancers were very large and should have been evaluated and treated months ago, and yes, my office was open for those cancer patients. They also had medical conditions which should have been evaluated and treated which puts me in a bind knowing that I need to do surgery on these patients and now because of many conditions, I have to remove these large cancers in my office under local anesthesia. Yes, this has been a very depressing week.

Hallie Miller further discusses this problem. CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Maryland’s largest health insurer, is not reimbursing some medical and mental health providers for appointments held over the phone or via audio-only platforms to the dismay of those providers.

CareFirst, which serves over 3 million members, is only reimbursing primary care physicians, obstetricians and gynecologists, and behavioral health providers under specific conditions. They are paid a flat rate of $20 regardless of the length of the call.

Other specialists such as cardiologists, ophthalmologists and neurologists are not reimbursed by CareFirst for any phone or audio-only services.

With the coronavirus pandemic prompting doctors’ offices and hospitals to restrict in-person patient visits and elective surgeries, physicians and medical professionals have been forced to rapidly adjust to telehealth methods to provide routine care. Much of the daily grind has shifted to virtual channels, with video visits and phone calls replacing face-to-face interaction between doctors and patients as public health experts caution against gathering in close proximity indoors.

Most insurers, public and private, are now paying for telemedicine. But the lack of uniformity in policy and standards among insurers has caused frustration among Maryland’s physicians and mental health professionals, who have to navigate a new mode of care with differing guidelines and rates across the board.

“If we genuinely want to meet patients where they are, we need to have multiple flexible platforms, and if the payer isn’t flexible, that’s a challenge,” said Dr. George Ruiz, the chief of cardiology at MedStar Union Memorial Hospital, MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital and MedStar Harbor Hospital. “If payment structures come into place, we can overcome one of the major barriers to care that exist in medicine.”

Ruiz said insurers should not discount phone and audio-only sessions, which can serve vulnerable patient populations that may not have the technology or the ability to set up a video visit. Phone appointments also offer patients more convenience during time-sensitive situations and keep people out of hospitals and emergency rooms.

Gene Ransom, the CEO of MedChi, the state’s medical society, said his group has lobbied CareFirst to reconsider its audio and phone-only reimbursement policy.

“By not paying for audio-only services, you’re paying for much more expensive visits to emergency rooms later,” said Ransom, adding that some CareFirst-insured patients might not seek out care in the first place if they know their insurance will not cover it. “Carving out certain specialties could lead to a really bad outcome for the patient.”

In a statement, CareFirst said it only began reimbursing for phone and audio calls as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and then only for some doctors to allow check-ins to maintain continuity of care. It will continue such coverage after July 24 when a member cost share waiver put in place during the outbreak expires.

It also will continue to cover telemedicine, which it defines as a combination of interactive audio and video, as it did before the pandemic, CareFirst said.

“Visits that include both audio and visual components allow for provision of quality care for our members,” according to the statement.

CareFirst, in its statement, also noted that many doctors’ offices have reopened to provide on-site care.

Dr. Michael Silverman, managing physician at Cardiovascular Specialists of Central Maryland, a Johns Hopkins affiliate, believes video adds little to the substance of a telehealth visit. A phone call, he said, can deliver urgent care to patients with physical or technological limitations.

Silverman said a patient called him on June 10 for a 22-minute consultation about his spinal surgery the next day, which precipitated another 20 minutes of medical record review and note writing. CareFirst did not reimburse him for this effort, he said.

“There are physicians right now who are really suffering, financially,” said Silverman, adding that he came close to having to close his practice when the coronavirus pandemic reached Maryland in March.” A call to a cardiologist goes a long way, but if they can’t call, so be it.”

Ransom said insurers should follow the federal government’s lead, which has issued guidelines for Medicare and Medicaid — the services that cover older adults and people with low incomes — to cover audio and phone appointments and waive member cost shares until further notice. Other providers such as Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare also cover audio-only visits, though the guidelines differ from company to company.

Some providers said insurers should standardize telehealth so it can be utilized beyond the fall, as such services offer a number of benefits for both patients and doctors.

Paul Berman, a Towson-based psychologist and director of professional affairs for the Maryland Psychological Association, said telemedicine has proven especially effective for people with depression and severe phobias who struggle with leaving the home or driving. It also serves as a vital lifeline for people with substance use disorders or those suffering from acute crises.

Berman said CareFirst’s $20 flat fee for “phone consultations” for behavioral health providers covers only specific sessions that are initiated by the patient and are not related to matters discussed within seven days prior or 24 hours after the call. As a result, it does not provide for continuity of care.

“You have people who benefit from, and even need, ongoing treatment in order to stabilize their emotional state and physical health, and if they don’t have access to services, their functioning deteriorates,” Berman said. “Many psychologists … are not able to make paid contact with patients because of this exclusion.”

Berman said psychologists and counselors, in particular, will be put at risk if they are forced to return to their offices during the ongoing pandemic, as therapy requires face-to-face interaction for up to an hour. Public health experts have warned that such interaction, especially indoors, can lead to transmission of COVID-19 through aerosols.

To mitigate out-of-pocket costs for patients, Berman said some psychologists have decided to provide low-fee services, or have patients to scale back the number of sessions scheduled per month. But this can create gaps in care for patients that lead to regression in their mental health, he said.

“People have been locked out of the ability to make use of mental health services if insurance has not waived the telephone exclusion,” he said. “It makes no sense.”

U.S. COVID-19 deaths rise for second week in a row and it continues to rise 

Reporter Lisa Shumaker noted that the U.S. deaths from COVID-19 rose for a second week in a row to more than 5,200 people in the week ended July 19, up 5% from the previous seven days, a Reuters analysis found.

The country reported over 460,000 new coronavirus cases last week, up nearly 15% from the prior week, according to the analysis of data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the outbreak.

Nineteen states have reported increases in deaths for at least two straight weeks, including, Arizona, Florida and Texas.

Testing for COVID-19 rose by 9% in the United States last week and set a new record high on Friday, with over 850,000 tests performed, the Reuters analysis found.

Nationally, 8.5% of tests came back positive for the novel coronavirus, down from 8.8% the prior week but still higher than the 5% level that the World Health Organization considers concerning because it suggests there are more cases in the community that have not yet been uncovered.

Thirty-one states had positivity test rates above 5%, according to the analysis, including Arizona at 24%, Florida and Nevada at 19%, and Idaho and Alabama at 18%.

Nationally, new COVID-19 cases have risen for seven straight weeks. Forty-three states reported more new cases of COVID-19 last week compared to the previous week, the analysis found.

For the first time since April, cases rose in New York State week over week, breaking a 13-week streak of declines. New Jersey now leads the nation with cases falling for two weeks in a row. The other six states have only seen cases decline for one week.

U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Could Be Cut 67 Percent With ‘Universal Mask Usage,’ Study Finds

Almost everyone is arguing about the use of masks and part of the problem is the changing opinions on mask wearing as well as the exhaustion of lockdowns and quarantines. Soo Kim reports that with novel coronavirus cases in the U.S. approaching nearly 3.9 million, several local authorities have issued orders requiring face coverings in public in a bid to reduce the spread of infection.

While many people have been opposed to mask mandates, the widespread use of masks could potentially help significantly reduce the country’s daily case count and daily death toll, according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

The U.S. daily death toll is currently projected to be around 815 by November 1, according to projections from the IHME. . This daily death toll projected for November 1 could be reduced by over 66.4 percent if “universal masks” were applied across the country, the institute noted.

Universal mask usage refers to a 95 percent usage of masks in public in every location, with “mandates re-imposed for six weeks if daily deaths reach eight per million (0.8 per 100,000),” the institute explained.

Universal masks could also reduce the country’s projected daily case count for November 1 by more than half, according to the research. The daily case count in the U.S. is currently projected to reach around 124,929 by November 1, the IHME noted.

If universal masks were applied across the country, the projected daily case count could be reduced to about 46,495 by November 1, over 62.7 percent less than the current daily case count projected by the institute for the same date.

The daily case count and daily death toll in Arizona, which was found to be the most “anti-mask” state by a survey of over 150,000 Twitter posts using anti-mask-related hashtags, could also be reduced by around 70 percent if universal masks were applied across the state.

The state’s daily case count is projected to hit around 3,176 by November 1, which could be reduced to around 899 with universal mask usage, according to the IHME projection, a more than 71.6 percent reduction in daily new cases.

Arizona’s daily death toll is expected to reach nearly 20 by November 1. But the projected daily death toll could be reduced by over 68 percent if universal masks were applied, the IHME noted.

Statewide mask mandates have been issued in several parts of the country, including most recently in Texas, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Oregon.

Masks are currently not required in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Face coverings are required in certain counties and cities within Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

This week, President Donald Trump appeared to have shifted from a reluctance to wearing face masks to suggesting they are patriotic, while sharing a photo of himself wearing one in a post Monday on his official Twitter account.

Telehealth could grow to a $250B revenue opportunity post-COVID-19: analysis

Heather Landi pointed out that during the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer adoption of telehealth has skyrocketed, from 11% of U.S. consumers using telehealth in 2019 to 46% of consumers now using telehealth to replace canceled healthcare visit, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Company’s COVID-19 consumer survey conducted in April.

McKinsey’s survey also found that about 76% of consumers say they are highly or moderately likely to use telehealth in the future. Seventy-four percent of people who had used telehealth reported high satisfaction.

Health systems, independent practices, behavioral health providers, and other healthcare organizations rapidly scaled telehealth offerings to fill the gap between need and canceled in-person care. Providers are ready for the shift to virtual care: 57% view telehealth more favorably than they did before COVID-19 and 64% are more comfortable using it, according to McKinsey’s recent provider surveys.

Pre-COVID-19, the total annual revenues of U.S. telehealth players were an estimated $3 billion, with the largest vendors focused on virtual urgent care.

Telehealth is now poised to take a bigger share of the healthcare market as McKinsey estimates that up to $250 billion, or 20% of all Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial outpatient, office, and home health spend could be done virtually.

The consulting firm looked at anonymized claims data representative of commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid utilization.

The company’s claims-based analysis suggests that approximately 20% of all emergency room visits could potentially be avoided via virtual urgent care offerings, 24% of healthcare office visits and outpatient volume could be delivered virtually, and an additional 9% “near-virtually.”

Up to 35% of regular home health attendant services could be virtualized, and 2% of all outpatient volume could be shifted to the home setting, with tech-enabled medication administration.

Many of the dynamics that have helped to expand telehealth adoption are likely to be in place for at least the next 12 to 18 months, as concerns about COVID-19 remain until a vaccine is widely available.

Going forward, telehealth can increase access to necessary care in areas with shortages, such as behavioral health, improve the patient experience, and improve health outcomes, McKinsey reported.

Providers and patients are concerned that recent federal and state policies expanding access to telehealth will be rolled back once the emergency period ends.

Industry groups, including the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), are calling on lawmakers to ensure the changes enacted by Congress and the administration become permanent.

McKinsey’s research indicates providers’ concerns about telehealth include security, workflow integration, effectiveness compared with in-person visits, and the future for reimbursement.

“We call on Medicare and all other insurers to continue to fund telehealth programs and work collaboratively on coverage and coding to lessen provider burden. We cannot go back to pre-COVID telehealth; instead, we must go forward. Patients will demand it and providers will expect it,” CHIME CEO and President Russell Branzell said in a recent statement.

Telehealth also is drawing bipartisan support. Senator Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., urged Congress to “continue to support this expansion and codify the administration’s changes to support the health needs of the American people,” in a recent news release.

Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Illinois, is introducing a bill directing HHS Secretary Alex Azar to oversee a telehealth study looking at the technology’s impact on health and costs, Politico reported in its newsletter today.

Taking advantage of the telehealth opportunity

Healthcare providers and payers will need to take action to ensure the full potential of telehealth is realized after the crisis has passed, according to McKinsey.

There continue to be challenges as providers cite concerns about telehealth include security, workflow integration, effectiveness compared with in-person visits, and the future for reimbursement. There also is a gap between consumers’ interest in telehealth (76%) and actual usage (46%). Factors such as lack of awareness of telehealth offerings and understanding of insurance coverage are some of the drivers of this gap.

“The current crisis has demonstrated the relevance of telehealth and created an opening to modernize the care delivery system,” McKinsey consultants wrote. “Healthcare systems that come out ahead will be those who act decisively, invest to build capabilities at scale, work hard to rewire the care delivery model, and deliver distinctive high-quality care to consumers.” 

McKinsey outlined steps industry stakeholders should take to drive the growth of telehealth.

Payers: Health plans should look to optimize provider networks and accelerate value-based contracting to incentivize telehealth. Align incentives for using telehealth, particularly for chronic patients, with the shift to risk-based payment models.

Payers also should build virtual health into new product designs to meet changing consumer preferences, This new design may include virtual-first networks, digital front-door features (for example, e-triage), seamless “plug-and-play” capabilities to offer innovative digital solutions, and benefit coverage for at-home diagnostic kits.

Health systems: Hospitals and health systems should accelerate the development of an overall consumer-integrated “front door.” Consider what the integrated product will initially cover beyond what currently exists and integrate with what may have been put in place in response to COVID-19, for example, e-triage, scheduling, clinic visits, record access.

Providers also should build the capabilities and incentives of the provider workforce to support virtual care, including, workflow design, centralized scheduling, and continuing education. And, health systems need to take steps to measure the value of virtual care by quantifying clinical outcomes, access improvement, and patient/provider satisfaction. Include the potential value from telehealth when contracting with payers for risk models to manage chronic patients, McKinsey said.

Investors and health technology firms: These players also can support the new reality of expanded telehealth services. Technology firms should consider developing scenarios on how virtual health will evolve and when, including how usage evolved post-COVID-19, based on expected consumer preferences, reimbursement, CMS and other regulations.

Investors also should develop potential options and define investment strategies based on the expected virtual health future. For example, combinations of existing players/platforms, linkages between in-person and virtual care offerings and create sustainable value. Investors and technology companies also can identify the assets and capabilities to implement these options, including specific assets or capabilities to best enable the play, and business models that will deliver attractive returns.

And Now Payment Problems as Patients Lose Coverage due to COVID                Leigh Page reviewed what many practices are seeing happen as the lockdowns ease up. Percy Erachshaw, DO, a general surgeon, was happy and encouraged when New York City started to open up a bit during the COVID outbreak and patients began coming back into doctors’ offices and having online visits. But Erachshaw, like many physicians nationwide, is quickly learning that the insurer payments he’s expecting may be a thing of the past.”The patient volume is back,” said Erachshaw, who manages four practice sites in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. Two of the sites that had been closed for 2 or 3 months recently reopened. However, “I have patients who don’t have insurance coverage anymore. They lost their jobs, but they are my long-term patients, so I can’t turn them away”. Many of these patients need help getting on Medicaid, but Erachshaw doesn’t have enough staff to help them. Much of his former staff left the practice and are not returning. With unemployment benefits temporarily enhanced by federal dollars, “They discovered they were making more money staying at home than working,” he said.                                                                                                            Many Patients Lost Healthcare Coverage                                                  Because of layoffs during the COVID-19 crisis, an estimated 12.7 million Americans lost employer coverage from early March to May 1. Even some workers who have not been laid off may lose coverage. Although the Affordable Care Act requires large employers to provide health insurance, small businesses can cancel coverage.

“Depending on how long the high unemployment lasts, practices could have many more uninsured patients,” said Lori Foley, managing principal in Atlanta, Georgia, for PYA, a national healthcare consulting and accounting firm.

Patients who lose coverage have the option of buying their own insurance, but in many cases, Foley says, they can’t afford to do so. “Premiums for individual health insurance can be expensive, and laid-off workers may not have been saving for that, because they did not expect to be laid off,” she said.

Indeed, many people simply don’t have the funds to take out a new insurance policy. According to one analysis, 40% of Americans do not have $400 to cover unexpected expenses.

Don’t expect patients who have been laid off to turn up at your office with a new form of coverage, says Kathryn I. Moghadas, a healthcare consultant in Winter Springs, Florida. “They’re not going to run out and get new coverage,” she said. “If they come in, they’ll want to use their credit cards and negotiate a cheaper rate with the office.”

Many people who are still working are concerned about their finances or about getting the virus, so they’re limiting their medical care. Health insurers Humana and Aetna recently noted that use of medical services has plummeted by at least 30%.

High deductibles, which have become increasingly common, also incentivize people to cut back on care, particularly at the beginning of the year, before they have met their deductible. Among workers who have a health insurance deductible, the average deductible is $1655 this year.

Many patients are selecting health services on the basis of price. More hospitals are providing their prices online and even offer tools to calculate payment estimates. Patients also have begun to expect price quotes from practices.

“When these patients call a practice, they may not want to simply book an appointment,” Foley said. “They will want to hear about your prices. Many practices are still not used to this. They often don’t have the self-pay prices and payment plan information available.”

Payers Are Making It Tougher                                                                                           Some health insurers are taking longer to pay because, like many other businesses in the COVID-19 era, they have fewer staff, says Michael La Penna, a practice management consultant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Due to the lower staffing, it can take an insurer longer than the usual 30 to 45 days to process a payment,” he said.                                                                                                 Low staffing has also made it hard to get prior authorizations, such as for primary care physicians’ (PCPs’) referrals to specialists in health maintenance organizations (HMOs). “We will call the HMO and we would be put on hold forever,” Erachshaw said. “It has been a mess and a half. If you don’t have an approval for a referral, you can’t refer the patient.”                                                                                                              Some payers have temporarily waived the prior authorization process for certain services during the COVID-19 crisis, but they may not implement those changes. “Many payers claim to have relaxed authorizations for ‘most’ or ‘many’ services,” the report said, “but what ‘most’ or ‘many’ means is anyone’s guess.”                Another area of confusion is the new or enhanced telehealth payments that Medicare and many private payers are temporarily allowing during the COVID crisis. “The typical PCP has six, seven, eight different payers, each with a different telehealth policy,” said Robert L. Phillips, MD, executive director Center for Professionalism and Value In Healthcare, a think tank in Washington, DC. “As a working clinician, I can’t manage all of those policy differences in my head.” “Each insurer has slightly different rules on telehealth, and they keep changing,” said Rebecca Etz, PhD, co-director of the Larry A. Green Center, another think tank in Washington, DC, which promotes primary care. “For example, some won’t pay for telephone-based care if the call lasts less than 10 minutes.”                                Insurance companies themselves may be confused about their own telehealth policies and thus underpay or deny payment to providers. Telehealth organizations say insurers have been slow to update their software and policies. Spotty payments for telemedicine and many other services mean many doctors are reimbursed only a fraction of what they are entitled. In an April survey of physicians and other clinicians in primary care, 57% said that fewer than half of their visits in the past week were reimbursable.                                                                                          Here are some ways practices can deal with patients who lose insurance and the insurance plans that represent them.                                                                                   Keep the bill low. Look for ways to keep costs in check. For example, “physicians could find less expensive form of meds for patients who are concerned about high costs,” Moghadas said.                                                                                                              Know your prices. “Practices should be able to tell self-pay patients what they basically can expect to pay,” Foley said. At the least, a practice could state that a new visit would cost $150 for the visit, plus additional costs for labs and x-rays, and a visit for an established patient would cost $75, she says.                                             Bring your patients back in. Many of your patients are not going to return to you without a little nudge. “You can’t sit back and wait. You need to remind them,” said Phil Boucher, MD, a pediatrician in Lincoln, Nebraska, who has been a speaker on the online Back to Busy Summit for physicians who want to revive their practices in the era of COVID-19.                                                                                                               “Reach out to your patients by sending them an email, if not a text or a message on social media,” he advised. “Better yet, go on local news and talk about your practice opening. Give them a reason to come in, such as annual checkups and routine care.” For example, Moghadas notes that diabetes patients generally need to come in every 3 months, and women need to see their gynecologist more often than once a year. “You can set up your EHR system to determine when each patient needs to come in,” she said.                                                                                                                                      Update insurance coverage information. “Asking every year about insurance coverage is not frequent enough right now because there are so many changes going on,” Foley said. “Ask about coverage on each visit.” adds that when employees are laid off, coverage often lasts for the rest of the month. If patients inform you of the change immediately, you might be able to get them in to see you before coverage ends, he says. Help patients get coverage. “Help to get patients signed up with Medicaid or COBRA,” Boucher said. “Your billing people can do this through a phone call.”

Small practices, however, may not have extra staff to do this work, Foley says. Also, many practices have staff shortages, such as Erachshaw’s practice. “I still have to find and train enough staff to get vital signs,” Erachshaw said. “I don’t have enough people to sign patients up for Medicaid.”

Effective Tactics to Collect from Patients                                                                   Having many uninsured patients means you have to shift to getting more payments from patients, which is harder to do than getting paid by insurers, Moghadas says. “It really takes a lot of effort to collect this money,” she said.                                     “Most practices are already experienced with patient collections, due to high deductibles,” Foley said. “Practices need to identify who is self-pay and what their discount approach is. “You have to collect at the time of service,” Foley adds. “If you wait until after the appointment, the chances of payment drop considerably.” If the bill is past due, “tell them about it when they come in for their next appointment,” she said. “It’s easier to collect a bill face to face.”                                                                                                        When patients say they can’t pay the bill, ask about their financial hardship. “Find out their household income,” Foley said. “Set up a sliding scale in which payments are reduced depending on the patient’s income. Health systems do this all the time.” After sending a few bills, Foley says, the next letter to the patient ― the pre-collect letter ― should state that the bill will now go to a collection agency unless it is paid in full. “People worried about their credit rating, such as those buying a house, will pay, but others are willing to let their debt go to a collection agency,” she said. Creating payment plans requires setting a reasonable monthly amount to be paid. “If you set the amount too low, it could take years to pay off,” she said. If the amount owed is $500 or less, she recommends setting up three monthly payments, and if it’s over $1000, then six monthly payments.                                                                               The Future                                                                                                                                     The road ahead for doctors still seems very bumpy. The reopening of public places is coming in fits and starts, and when the number of COVID-19 cases rises again, patients stay away for a while, Phillips says. “Each temporary spike in COVID cases has a lasting effect on practices,” he said. “Patients will disappear for a while afterward.             Philips predicts that because of the epidemic, primary care practices will lose almost $20 billion by the end of the year. If temporary telemedicine payments were removed, the losses could be double that, he says.                                                         When Medicare and other payers drop the current higher payments for telemedicine, as planned, many doctors will be forced to give up telemedicine, predicts La Penna. “At lower or nonexistent reimbursement rates for telemedicine, it would not be worth their while to use it,” he said.                                                       Some doctors, however, are doing surprisingly well now that the virus is abating and some restrictions have been lifted in some areas. When surgeries were temporarily banned because of COVID-19, George Waring IV, MD, an ophthalmologist in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, lost almost all his patients. When he reopened in May, he was not sure whether his previous volume of patients would return. Many of his patients undergo Lasik surgery to replace glasses or contact lenses, or they receive advanced lens implants after cataract surgery, both of which are usually not covered by health insurance.                                                           But as it turned out, he’s had more visits than at this time last year. Was this the result of pent-up demand for services, as many observers expected after bans on elective surgery are lifted? “No,” he said, “it’s much more than that.”                            He has several explanations for the high demand. “Having to wear masks against COVID makes people less comfortable wearing glasses, because they steam up,” he said. “Also, people need to avoid putting their hand on their face, which you have to do to insert contact lenses. So, they want Lasik. “Furthermore,” he added, “sheltering in place has made some people more contemplative, and they may get a new perspective on life and consider visual self-improvement.”

The question is what does the future look like and how do we prepare, which is what a paper that I wrote with two co-authors and was just accepted for publication considered (Science and Data Driven Choice: Shaping Empowerment During COVID-19 and Beyond)… Yeah!

COVID-19 Took a Huge Cut of Clinicians’ Business in March and April

If you have a business, whether it is a medical practice, or other form of business you recognize the stress and changes in your business, most of them bad for your bottom line. Also, as lock-downs have been eased you realize the overall change in the way business will be managed in your immediate and probable long-term futures. Richard Franki noted that in the first 2 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care professionals experienced sharp drops in both utilization and revenue, according to an analysis of the nation’s largest collection of private health care claims data.

For the months of March and April 2020, use of medical professional services dropped by 65% and 68%, respectively, compared with last year, and estimated revenue fell by 45% and 48%, FAIR Health, a nonprofit organization that manages a database of 31 billion claim records, said in a new report.

For the Northeast states – the epicenter of the pandemic in March and April – patient volume was down by 60% in March and 80% in April, while revenue fell by 55% in March and 79% in April, the organization said.

For this analysis, “a professional service was defined as any service provided by an individual (e.g., physician, nurse, nurse practitioner, physician assistant) instead of being billed by a facility,” FAIR Health noted. Figures for 2019 were adjusted using the Consumer Price Index.

The size of the pandemic-related decreases in utilization and income varied by specialty. Of the seven specialties included in the study, oral surgery was hit the hardest, followed by gastroenterology, cardiology, orthopedics, dermatology, adult primary care, and pediatric primary care, FAIR Health said.

After experiencing a 2% drop in utilization this January and an increase of 4% in February, compared with 2019, gastroenterology saw corresponding drops of 73% in March and 77% in April. Estimated revenue for the specialty was flat in January and rose by 10% in February, but plummeted by 75% in March and 80% in April, the FAIR Health data show.

In cardiology, patient volume from 2019 to 2020 looked like this: Down by 4% in January, up 5% in February, down by 62% in March, and down by 71% in April. The earnings numbers tell a similar story: Down by 2% in January, up by 15% in February, down by 57% in March, and down by 73% in April, the organization reported.

Dermatology did the best among the non–primary care specialties, but that was just a relative success. Utilization still dropped by 62% and 68% in March and April of 2020, compared with last year, and revenue declined by 50% in March and 59% in April, FAIR Health said.

For adult primary care, the utilization numbers were similar, but revenue took a somewhat smaller hit. Patient volume from 2019 to 2020 was fairly steady in January and February, then nosedived in March (down 60%) and April (down 68%). Earnings were up initially, rising 1% in January and 2% in February, but fell 47% in March and 54% in April, FAIR Health said.

Pediatric primary care, it appears, may have been buoyed somewhat by its younger patients. The specialty as a whole saw utilization tumble by 52% in March and 58% in April, but revenue dropped by just 32% and 35%, respectively, according to the report.

A little extra data diving showed that the figures for preventive care visits for patients aged 0-4 years in March and April were –2% and 0% for volume and –2% and 1% for revenue. Meanwhile, the volume of immunizations only dropped by 14% and 10% and vaccine-related revenue slipped by just 7% and 2%, FAIR Health noted.

“Across many specialties from January to April 2020, office or other outpatient [evaluation and management] visits became more common relative to other procedures. This may have been due in part to the fact that many of these E&M services could be rendered via telehealth,” FAIR Health said.

Telehealth, however, was no panacea, the report explained: “Even when medical practices have continued to function via telehealth, many have experienced lower reimbursements for telehealth visits than for in-person visits and more time educating patients on how to use the technology.

Patients Who Refuse to Wear a Mask: Responses That Won’t Get You Sued

Carolyn Buppert, MSN, JD, related a case that we in my office have recently seen. Your waiting room is filled with mask-wearing individuals, except for one person. Your staff offers a mask to this person, citing your office policy of requiring masks for all persons in order to prevent asymptomatic COVID spread, and the patient refuses to put it on.

In our case the patients are all told ahead of time that they must bring and wear a mask if they want to be admitted to our office. Last week this patient came into our office and refused to wear a mask and of course wasn’t wearing a mask.

What can you/should you/must you do? Are you required to see a patient who refuses to wear a mask? If you ask the patient to leave without being seen, can you be accused of patient abandonment? If you allow the patient to stay, could you be liable for negligence for exposing others to a deadly illness?

I’ll let all of you know that we refuse to see patients or even have them enter our office if they don’t wear masks. This is a requirement for our practice to protect my staff, my other patients and yes, even me that practitioner.

We will not even see patients who have traveled from those states where the COVID-19 infection rate has surged. They must self-quarantine and must have a negative COVID test before we will see them as a patient. And yes, this has happened, even this happened just this past Monday.

The rules on mask-wearing, while initially downright confusing, have inexorably come to a rough consensus. By governors’ orders, masks are now mandatory in most states, though when and where they are required varies. For example, effective July 7, the governor of Washington has ordered that a business not allow a customer to enter without a face covering.

So far, there are no cases or court decisions to guide us about whether it is negligence to allow an unmasked patient to commingle in a medical practice. Nor do we have case law to help us determine whether patient abandonment would apply if a patient is sent home without being seen.

We can apply the legal principles and cases from other situations to this one, however, to tell us what constitutes negligence or patient abandonment.

The practical questions, legally, are who might sue and on what basis?

Who Might Sue?

Someone who is injured in a public place may sue the owner for negligence if the owner knew or should have known of a danger and didn’t do anything about it. For example, individuals have sued grocery stores successfully after they slipped on a banana peel and fell. If, say, the banana peel was black, that indicates that it had been there for a while, and judges have found that the store management should have known about it and removed it.

Compare the banana peel scenario to the scenario where most news outlets and health departments are telling people, every day, to wear masks while in indoor public spaces, yet owners of a medical practice or facility allow individuals who are not wearing masks to sit in their waiting room. If an individual who was also in the waiting room with the unmasked individual develops COVID-19 two days later, the ill individual may sue the medical practice for negligence for not removing the unmasked individual.

What about the individual’s responsibility to move away from the person not wearing a mask? That is the aspect of this scenario that attorneys and experts could argue about, for days, in a court case. But to go back to the banana peel case, one could argue that a customer in a grocery store should be looking out for banana peels on the floor and avoid them, yet courts have assigned liability to grocery stores when customers slip and fall.

Let’s review the four elements of negligence which a plaintiff would need to prove:

• Duty: Obligation of one person to another
• Breach: Improper act or omission, in the context of proper behavior to avoid imposing undue risks of harm to other persons and their property
• Damage
• Causation: That the act or omission caused the harm

Those who run medical offices and facilities have a duty to provide reasonably safe public spaces. Unmasked individuals are a risk to others nearby, so the “breach” element is satisfied if a practice fails to impose safety measures. Causation could be proven, or at least inferred, if contact tracing of an individual with COVID showed that the only contact likely to have exposed the ill individual to the virus was an unmasked individual in a medical practice’s waiting room, especially if the unmasked individual was COVID-positive before, during, or shortly after the visit to the practice.

What About Patient Abandonment?

“Patient abandonment” is the legal term for terminating the physician-patient relationship in such a manner that the patient is denied necessary medical care. It is a form of negligence.

Refusing to see a patient unless the patient wears a mask is not denying care, in this attorney’s view, but rather establishing reasonable conditions for getting care. The patient simply needs to put on a mask.

What about the patient who refuses to wear a mask for medical reasons? There are exceptions in most of the governors’ orders for individuals with medical conditions that preclude covering nose and mouth with a mask. A medical office is the perfect place to test an individual’s ability or inability to breathe well while wearing a mask. “Put the mask on and we’ll see how you do” is a reasonable response. Monitor the patient visually and apply a pulse oximeter with mask off and mask on. In our office each patient has pulse oximetry done as part of our COVID screening and anyone with a problem is sent out to their primary care doctor to be assessed for a COVID infection. There are no exceptions. As I have said before, this is to protect the patient, our other patients, my staff and yes, me the practitioner. No exceptions!

Dr. Atlas: Coronavirus surges linked mostly to protests — and proximity to US-Mexico border

Victoria Garcia of Fox News reported that the recent surges, as the daily infections approach 70,000, in U.S. coronavirus cases can be traced to two key factors — crowds of protesters and proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution, said Saturday night. ‘Protesting, sharing megaphones, screaming. That’s a setup to spread cases,’ Atlas says

Most of the cases in the Southwest — California, Arizona and Texas — are occurring in counties closest to the U.S.-Mexico border, Atlas told anchor Jon Scott during an appearance on “Fox Report Weekend.”

“When you look in the southern counties of California, Arizona and the bordering counties of Texas — with the Mexico border — these are where most of these cases are really exploding,” Atlas said. “And then you look at the Mexico map and in Mexico, that’s where their cases are. Their cases are in the northern border zone states. And it turns out the timeline here correlates much more to the Mexico timeline of increasing cases than anything else.”

Spikes in Texas, Florida and Arizona don’t essentially line up with reopening but with Mexico’s surge and the recent protests that have gripped the U.S., Atlas said.

“When you really look closely at these so-called re-opening policies, whether it’s in Georgia or Florida or Texas, you know, we didn’t really see a big correlation of cases and hospitalizations from that,” Atlas said. “That’s really not true. That’s sort of some sloppy thinking, I think, again. We really have to look closely at why these things are happening.

“By the way. California didn’t really reopen. Yet they have cases coming up. Why is that? I mean, that’s because these cases don’t really correlate to that.”

‘A setup to spread cases’

“They correlate mainly to two things — the big thousands and thousands of people with protesting, sharing megaphones, screaming. That’s a setup to spread cases,” Atlas said. “And also, when you look at the analysis of the border counties, there’s a tremendous amount of cases coming over the border and exchanging with families in the northern Mexico states.”

Atlas also explained the hospital capacity situation in Texas and Arizona. “So, the real concern that that I see right now is that there are hospitals getting crowded in their ICUs and this is clearly a concern,” Atlas said. “The crowding is from the reinstatement of regular medical care, which is actually very important. We have locked that down before and that policy kills people. So, we don’t want to go back to that.”

“The solution to this is really protect the high risk in a more diligent way than we are, the very highest-risk group. We have been very, very clear about that to people,” Atlas said. “The second part is increasing the hospital capacity.”

Fauci says states need to address problems with COVID-19 response: ‘If you don’t admit it, you can’t correct it’

Savannah Behrman of the USA TODAY reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday that states need to face problems with their coronavirus responses because “if you don’t admit it, you can’t correct it.”

In an interview with “The Journal,” a podcast from the Wall Street Journal, Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, discussed the alarming rates of coronavirus cases that are surging in some states that reopened quickly. 

“What we’re seeing is exponential growth, it went from an average of about 20,000 to 40,000 and 50,000. That’s doubling,” Fauci said.

Fauci told Congress last week that new coronavirus infections could increase to 100,000 a day if the nation doesn’t get its surge of cases under control. During the interview, he discussed conversations the White House coronavirus task force has been having with governors and health officials from states where cases are spiking. “Among the states, and there is admission from within,” the doctor explained. “Some states went too fast, some states went according to what the time table was, but the people in the state didn’t listen, and threw caution to the wind.”

Fauci was pressed on “mixed messaging” coming from the White House coronavirus task force regarding warnings he and other health officials such as Dr. Deborah L. Birx have sounded versus comments from elected officials such as Vice President Mike Pence. 

“Well, you know, I think in fairness to the vice president, the vice president understands that. But he is trying in his role as the vice president to really in a certain sense also point out some of the things that are going well,” Fauci said. “So, he is a person who is an optimistic person and is doing a very good job as the leader of the task force, I must say.”

He continued that he and other public health officials are “coldly” looking at the data that results in recommendations from the task force, but that as “a member of the task force, I’m telling you that we have a serious situation here that we really do need to address.” 

His comments come a day after President Donald Trump disputed Fauci’s comments that the U.S. is still “knee-deep in the first wave” of the pandemic. “I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him,” Trump said in an interview. 

The nation surpassed 3 million coronavirus cases and 132,256 deaths Wednesday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The grim milestone represents roughly a quarter of the world’s cases and the same percentage of its deaths.

Tuesday saw a record 60,021 new cases as the nationwide surge showed no signs of ebbing.  Cases are surging in states such as Texas, Florida, and Arizona, and some have now paused or reversed their reopenings. 

Fauci stressed that the public health “message” needs to work in tandem with states reopening in order for states to be able to protect their citizens’ health and the economy.

And this all has to be considered as we get closer to the school year. Do we send our children back to school and how do we educate our kids?

And Now Some Good News Regarding this Pandemic: New study suggests COVID-19 brought American families closer together

From developmental milestones to simple heart to hearts, three-quarters of parents polled experienced a key moment, which they otherwise may have missed, with their children while in lockdown. Seventy-five percent of American parents witnessed a key moment in their child’s life while in self-isolation, according to new research.

The survey of 2,000 Americans — of which about 1,200 were parents — asked respondents about their time sheltering in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the perks of being surrounded by family. From developmental milestones to simple heart-to-hearts, three-quarters of parents polled experienced a key moment that they otherwise may have missed with their children while in lockdown. The survey found 66% of those surveyed said the pandemic has brought them closer to their family than ever before. (iStock)

Respondents were asked to share the key moments they experienced, and one respondent said their child got to meet an aunt for the first time, while another was able to successfully potty train their little one. Another respondent shared how their child confided in them that they were being bullied at school, while someone else shared they were able to watch their son be sworn into the National Guard via a livestream.

Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Juice Plus+, the survey found 66 percent of those surveyed said the pandemic has brought them closer to their family than ever before. It’s no surprise that 77 percent of respondents were also in agreement that they’ve enjoyed spending more time with the members of their household. The survey also found respondents have learned a lot about their families while sheltering in place as well.

Nearly half of respondents admitted they didn’t really know what their significant other’s job was before they began working from home during self-isolation. Seventy-nine percent of parents surveyed said they’ve also learned more about their children’s hobbies and passions during this time. While another 77 percent of parents said their children have become more open to learning new things around the house and trying new activities.

In fact, 31 percent of those surveyed said they’ve taught a family member a new skill while they’ve been in quarantine. Seven in 10 respondents also shared their increased time indoors has been a wake-up call for them to focus on their families’ unhealthy habits. Forty-one percent of those polled said they’ve added more priority to eating meals as a family during their time in isolation.

“During these unprecedented times, it has been a delight to see families becoming closer than ever before and enjoying the additional time they have gotten together while staying home,” said Dr. Mitra Ray, Ph.D., research biochemist and health ambassador with Juice Plus+. “In turn, this has led to an increase in family meals, which are proven to form better eating habits and a healthier lifestyle for years to come.”

Another 29 percent of respondents shared they learned how to cook a new family recipe. Seventy-one percent of respondents shared this has all been possible because it’s been easier for them to adhere to a new and improved schedule for themselves and their families while they’ve been sheltering in place. For those surveyed who’ve been working from home during this time, 41% said they’ve enjoyed having a more flexible schedule. A further 38 percent of these respondents shared another perk of working remotely is they’ve been able to enjoy more quality time with their family. Regardless of whether respondents are working from home, 68% shared they’ve used lockdown to improve their family’s communication skills.

“As more people become accustomed to working from home, they are finding silver linings in its flexible benefits, such as forming stronger relationships with their families,” observed Sean Hopkins, chief revenue officer for Juice Plus+. “We value and support the impact of year-round remote working models allowing more people to stay home – offering the opportunity to work according to their own schedules and give greater priority to their loves ones and their overall happiness and well-being.”

TOP PRIORITIES ADDED TO AMERICANS’ ROUTINES IN SELF-ISOLATION

Eaten more meals as a family or with members of my household – 41%
Spent more time with my family/household – 37%
Started a new exercise routine – 36%
Learned something new about someone I live with – 33%
Made more purchases online – 32%
Taught a family member a new skill – 31%
Tuned in more to the news – 31%
Learned how to cook a new family recipe – 29%
Started a new hobby – 26%
Focused more on my/my family’s nutrition – 25%
Connected virtually with my peers – 25%
Focused more on sleep – 20%

TOP BENEFITS OF WORKING REMOTELY DURING COVID-19

Enjoying a more flexible schedule – 41%
Being able to enjoy more quality time with their family – 38%
Being more productive – 33%
Not having to commute – 29%
Not having to dress up – 29%
Being able to work from the comfort of their home – 27%
Saving money – 27%
Being able to improve their communication skills – 21%
Feeling more motivated to work – 18%
Having fewer distractions than at the office – 17%

Maryland man may be first person successfully vaccinated against COVID-19

Isabelle Friedberg in the New York Post, noted that a Maryland man believes he may be one of the first people to be successfully vaccinated against the coronavirus after participating in a trial that has reported promising early results in producing antibodies, according to reports.

David Rach, a graduate immunology student, was the first person to be injected in the trial at the University of Maryland in May, where US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German firm BioNTech are working together in the global race to create a vaccine, the Daily Mail reports.

Now, early indications show the vaccine is working by stimulating the growth of antibodies at rates equal or higher to those who have the illness, according to WJLA.

” There is a component of relief seeing that it’s actually producing results, that the vaccine is producing antibodies,” Rach told the news station. Rach cannot be certain he was given the actual vaccine or a placebo saline solution but after a slight reaction from his second dose, he is convinced he is one of the very few people in the world vaccinated against COVID-19, the outlet said. He is due to be tested in October to determine if he does have immunity against the virus. Remember, we need to know if the immunity is long term, especially with the mutation of this virus. If the trial proves successful, Pfizer said it will produce 100 million doses before the end of the year and more than a billion doses next year, WJLA reports.

When COVID-19 and flu season coexist, we need the right tests to tell which is which

Fred Pelzman reflected on his past training as a physician. Long ago, when I was a resident, I worked an overnight emergency room shift and saw a patient who presented with episodes of shortness of breath both at rest and on exertion.

As a fairly freshly minted new intern, I was still definitely getting the hang of things, and probably took way longer to do my history and physical exam, before I was finally ready to present to the attending who was staffing the emergency department that night. Maybe I wasn’t very good at taking a history back then, and I may have missed some critical questions that needed to be asked or hadn’t ordered the right tests, but I remember finishing up my evaluation and still not really being sure what was going on with this patient.

“Let’s Treat Both”

Back then we didn’t have troponins and BNPs and D-dimers run on everyone who showed up in the emergency room, but as I remember this, all we had was a chest X-ray and an EKG that were both pretty unrevealing. I remember thinking that I wasn’t sure whether this case was pulmonary or cardiac in nature.

But I also remember being confused by the advice I got from that particular doctor that day, as his way of solving a diagnostic dilemma. “Let’s treat both,” he said, “and see if he gets better.” His recommendation was that we send the patient out with an albuterol inhaler, in case this was a flare of reactive airway disease, as well as sublingual nitroglycerin, in case it was angina pectoris. “Take both of these next time this happens and call me in the morning.”

Since the patient wasn’t having symptoms at the time of their ED visit, neither treatment given in the emergency room was likely to answer the question, so the attending physician decided to try the two most obvious, and then see what worked. What bothered me most, I recall thinking at the time, was that if he tried both, how were we going to know which one was working?

Trying serial treatments for a non-life-threatening illness is a reasonable option we have all pursued (“Let’s try treatment A for a week, and if that does not do it, we can switch to treatment B and see how that goes”). But throwing everything and the kitchen sink never seems to clear things up; instead, it just muddies the waters.

Double Trouble

This long-ago case reminds me of what we may be facing as we head into a second wave of COVID-19, if the pandemic continues its now-apparent summer push and builds into a torrent in the fall as the inevitable flu season rises up to join us.

In the early days of this pandemic, before we had much testing at all (in fact, at one point there was absolutely no outpatient testing allowed, and the limited tests we had were reserved for the sickest inpatients), in the outpatient world we pretty much assumed that anybody with a cough, shortness of breath, or a fever, was COVID-19, and for the most part we couldn’t even prove otherwise. There were restrictions on our use of respiratory viral panels (to diagnose influenza, RSV, or other viral pathogens), and no PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 was available to us, so we pretty much assumed you had COVID-19, and if you were stable enough to go home, then that was it.

Luckily, in those earliest days, influenza had already significantly tapered off for the season, so there was little that we were seeing in the community to confuse the clinical picture. But what happens when they’re both here at the same time? What happens when we have both of these significant respiratory pathogens, and knowing which one is going on may make all the difference in the world?

The right test at the right time can make that difference. When we had no tests, we assumed everything was COVID-19, and either sent them home or sent them to the hospital to be admitted. Then, when we got the ability to test certain selected patients, we were able to further distinguish between the sickest that we needed to send to the emergency room, and those we could safely send home and give them their COVID-19 test results the next morning. But what if there are two virulent diseases raging through our community at the same time? At that point, having a rapid test that can safely distinguish influenza or other respiratory pathogens from COVID-19 may be just what we need.

Thinking About the Next Wave

As we begin to think about the next wave, about what the coming months may hold for us, it seems like having rapid flu testing available in the office, as well as rapid point-of-care testing for COVID-19, may be what we need to safely diagnose, safely treat, safely send home, safely quarantine, and safely track contacts, to prevent the second wave from being as devastating as the first. We need to begin now preparing for the next, not reacting after it’s already here, not wishing we had more testing, more PPE, more ICU beds, more ventilators.

This is how we need to be thoughtful, how we need to see this with the eyes of a public health officer, an epidemiologist, a scientist, a physician. Because when the time comes, when we’re knee-deep in this stuff, when things are going all to hell, we don’t want to wish we had what we need to do the right thing for our patients.

Hopefully those who are facing the new surge of this virus elsewhere in this country, away from the epicenter that was New York City, are heeding the lessons we learned about who is at highest risk for decompensation, who can safely go home, and how to treat the sickest of the sick. And while the next wave is still over the horizon, we need to ensure that those who have the power to make the decisions about how we might respond to what comes next are listening to the most experienced voices in the room. Otherwise we might be sending people home with a Z-Pak, some oral steroids, an albuterol inhaler, Tamiflu, an antihistamine, and a PPI just in case.

‘Cause you never know.

How the White House can build public trust and end the coronavirus crisis

Dan Goldberg reported on the mixed messages on the severity of the pandemic from federal and state officials helped drive a coronavirus surge in June across much of the United States and that the window to act is closing.

Now, top public health officials are warning that the country could see as many as 100,000 new cases per day, testing capacity is reaching its limit and the virus is spreading out of control. After months of downplaying the coronavirus threat, the White House has changed course, urging Americans to wear masks and avoid large gatherings. But it is not clear whether the public will listen, after months of recovery talk and political battles over everything from masks to infectious disease modeling.

Public health experts say the window to act is closing, and that if the government wants to change the course of the U.S. outbreak, officials need to deliver clear, consistent messages. They should be frank about what we still don’t know about the virus, emphasize that our fates are collectively tied and focus on the need for face coverings, social distancing and frequent hand-washing.

“National leaders, including the vice president and president and governors, should not only be talking about and encouraging people to follow public health guidance — they should be modeling it themselves wherever they can,” said Tom Inglesby, director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security. “No more of this kind of strange commentary about ‘personal choice.’ The point is to protect your neighbor, so the idea of it being a personal choice is illogical.”

An administration official rejected the idea that the messages coming from the White House have been confusing or inconsistent. “Since March, the administration has consistently recommended the use of face coverings consistent with CDC guidelines, and that messaging has been included in every set of guidance from the administration,” the official said. “The messaging understands the urgency of certain states.”

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says the first step the Trump administration should take is unmuzzling its scientists.

Anthony Fauci with Vice President Mike Pence. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo

The CDC abruptly stopped its regular briefings on the virus in March and has held only a handful since then. The White House coronavirus task force, whose members include top government scientists such as Anthony Fauci, no longer addresses the nation via daily televised briefings. And its once-daily private meetings are down to twice a week.

At the same time, more than 80 percent of Americans trust medical scientists, and more than two-thirds trust Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.

“The CDC and the other public health experts within the government need to be on the front lines talking to the country every day,” Lipsitch said. “People without scientific qualifications … do not need to be stealing the show in terms of public communication.”

But that is what has happened over the last few months, as President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other political leaders have dominated the national conversation about how to fight the virus — often contradicting the government’s own health experts.

As cases soared in the Southeast in June, Trump repeatedly said that the new infections were simply a reflection of more testing. And as hospital capacity reached alarming levels in Texas and Arizona last week, Pence tried to tamp down concern by emphasizing that most new infections were in younger adults. He also attended a huge indoor rally at a Dallas church last Sunday and defended Trump’s decision to hold a rally in Arizona days before — where thousands of mostly maskless supporters spent hours cheering — saying it gave people the freedom to participate in the political process.

“It sends a message that those things are okay, and they are not,” Inglesby said. “These political leaders know the information and they still attended, suggesting these things are low risk. They are not low risk.”

With no clear message from the top, governors are sending their own mixed signals. Bars in Texas reopened in May while North Carolina’s stayed closed. Churches were allowed to remain open in Florida but not in Kentucky. Face coverings are mandated in New Jersey but a “personal preference” in Oklahoma.

The White House has sought to correct course over the last two weeks — with mixed results. Days after Pence said “panic is overblown,” he urged younger Americans, who were ignoring “the guidance that we gave on the federal level for all the phases of reopening,” to be more vigilant because they were a growing cause of the spread. The same administration official said there are also political considerations at play — if the vice president isn’t shaping the conversation, then the void will be filled by Trump critics or political opponents.

Trump on Wednesday told Fox Business that he’d wear a mask when he could not socially distance, in line with CDC recommendations, but only once has he been spotted wearing one. At a news conference in late May, Trump taunted a Reuters journalist for wearing a facial covering and accused the reporter of wanting to be “politically correct.” The president also mocked Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, for wearing a mask.

There is evidence that the president’s skepticism has influenced public behavior. Three-quarters of Democrats who responded to a recent Pew poll said they wore masks most or all of the time in public, while just 53 percent of Republicans did the same. The split held even after controlling for differences in the severity of the outbreak in different parts of the country. “The president has a unique ability to derail good policy,” Lipsitch said.

Going forward, the government needs to do a better job of managing expectations, said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease researcher at the Columbia University School of Public Health. The coronavirus was unknown to science until December, and our understanding of it is changing as time passes and more people are infected.

The CDC, for example, first said masks would do little good and that the virus mostly affected the respiratory system. The guidance has evolved along with the understanding of the disease. Public health experts now know that children are more vulnerable than originally thought.

“This is where leadership and messaging are so important,” Shaman said. “People have to understand it’s not like you can spend a month wearing masks and then it’s done. We don’t have our Get Out of Jail Free card yet.”

White House messengers need to express more humility and explain how much we still don’t know, said Lori Freeman, CEO for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

The cost of coronavirus treatment

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Janette Setembre of Fox Business noted that the cost of the coronavirus can be devastating.

Americans could spend thousands of dollars on medical bills if they need treatment for COVID-19 – with or without insurance. And those who were hospitalized or caring for a loved who is could have to defer credit card bills, mortgage payments and deplete their savings to afford them.

Broadway star Nick Cordero died Sunday at 41 after spending nearly four months in the hospital battling COVID-19. Days earlier, his wife, Amanda Kloots, posted on social media about having to refinance her home to help pay for the treatment costs. A family friend created a GoFundMe page for Cordero’s medical costs with a goal of raising $400,000. It received nearly 5,000 donations raising $813,507.

The Cordero family is one of the millions grappling with the emotional and burdening financial costs of the deadly virus. An estimated 15 percent of people who contract COVID-19 could end up in the hospital, according to data published in April by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on medical issues. The data shows that up to an estimated 2 percent to 7 percent – or 670,000 to slightly more than 2 million — of uninsured people will require hospitalization for the novel coronavirus.

That would have been the case for Denver-based Tim Regan, 40, who went to the emergency room in March when he experienced a fever, chest pain and shortness of breath. He went to the emergency room when a nurse advised him to, explaining he had COVID-19 symptoms. Regan received a chest X-ray and an electrocardiogram (EKG) but was told he wasn’t sick enough to qualify for a COVID test.

“The doctor told me he was convinced I had it, several people in the medical field told me I had it without giving me a test,” Regan told FOX Business. Regan worried that if he had to be admitted to a hospital, he would deplete his savings so he continued working from home while he was sick. “I was thinking I had to make all the money I could in case we all had to be hospitalized,” he said, worried that he might infect his wife and child. Regan was billed $3,278 for his ER visit. “The insurance told us, ‘We’re not paying for it.’ We would have been stuck with everything. I don’t think we quite met the deductible. It would have wiped out any savings we had,” Regan said.

Medical bills for uninsured patients can range between $42,486 to $74,310, according to a report by FAIR Health, an independent nonprofit. But even those who do have insurance could be saddled with out-of-pocket costs between $21,936 and as much as $38,755.

“Even after you get the treatment it leaves a bunch of financial questions. If you have traditional insurance, the reason for that is so many plans have high deductibles, and if you’re on a high deductible plan you’re responsible for that deductible amount; it can be $5,000, $8,000 or more,” said Patrick Quigley, CEO and co-founder of Sidecar Health, which provides personalized and affordable health insurance.

“The second issue is the network – if you happen to go to a hospital that’s out of network your traditional insurance company isn’t responsible for those charges – they may help, but they don’t have negotiated rates with those hospitals so people with insurance will have to pay the remaining balance,” Quigley said.

And some survivors who battled for their lives while seeking treatment for the virus are left with shocking medical costs. The Seattle Times reported last month the case of Michael Flor, a 70-year-old man from Seattle who was hit with a $1.1 million hospital bill, which included 181 pages of expenses like $9,736 per day for the intensive care room, almost $409,000 for it to be sterilized and $82,000 for the ventilator, among other treatment costs. Flor had Medicare insurance and would be covered for most of the expenses, the Times reported.

Congress allocated more than $100 billion to assist insurance companies and hospitals dealing with the unprecedented treatment costs during COVID-19.

Coronavirus expert says Americans will be wearing masks for ‘several years’

Shawn Carter reported that health experts won’t ask Americans to take off their masks any time soon. That’s the take of Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. He has been preparing for an outbreak like the novel coronavirus as part of his work for years.

Johns Hopkins practices virus simulations as part of is preparedness protocol, with the goal of offering public health experts and policymakers a blueprint of what to do in a pandemic. One of those simulations took place in October 2019, when Toner and a team of researchers launched a coronavirus pandemic simulation in New York, running through various scenarios on how residents, governments and private businesses would hypothetically react to the threat.

One thing that stood out to him: Face coverings are a vital defense to stop the spread of the virus. He believes COVID-19 won’t slow down in the U.S. even as states start to slowly reopen.

“There’s going to be no summertime lull with a big wave in the fall,” he said as part of CNET’s Hacking the Apocalypse series. “It’s clear that we are having a significant resurgence of cases in the summer, and they’ll get bigger. And it’ll keep going until we lock things down again.”

The U.S. recently added about 43,000 positive COVID-19 cases to its 2.9 million totals, according to the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. The death total has surpassed 130,000.

Toner, contrasting the novel virus to seasonal influenza, said until there is a vaccine, communities’ best defense to fight it is through creating distance and wearing masks. “I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing, we will be living with — hopefully living with happily — for several years,” he said. “It’s actually pretty straightforward. If we cover our faces, and both you and anyone you’re interacting with are wearing a mask, the risk of transmission goes way down.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top official handling the U.S. COVID-19 response, said recently he was cautiously optimistic that there could be a vaccine for the virus by 2021. For those who refuse to wear a mask in the interim, Toner said they’ll eventually wise up. “They will get over it,” he says. “It’s just a question of how many people get sick and die before they get over it.”

One final thought, Congress must decide whether to extend federal aid for the unemployed beyond July. Ten million more Americans are out of work than in February, but evidence has emerged of falling poverty levels due to the stimulus. Could the coronavirus change the politics of poverty?

The world surpassed two sobering coronavirus milestones last Sunday—500,000 confirmed deaths, 10 million confirmed cases—and hit another high mark for daily new infections as governments that attempted reopenings continued to backtrack and warn that worse news could be yet to come.

“COVID-19 has taken a very swift and very dangerous turn in Texas over just the past few weeks,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, who allowed businesses to start reopening in early May but on Friday shut down bars and limited restaurant dining amid a spike in cases.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom rolled back reopenings of bars in seven counties, including Los Angeles. He ordered them to close immediately and urged eight other counties to issue local health orders mandating the same.

South Africa’s health minister warned that the country’s current surge of cases is expected to rapidly increase in the coming weeks and push hospitals to the limit. Health Minister Zwelini Mkhize said the current rise in infections has come from people who “moved back into the workplace. It was therefore inevitable that there would be cluster outbreaks as infections spilled over from communities into places of congregation such as mines, factories, taxis and buses.”

New clusters of cases at a Swiss nightclub and in the central English city of Leicester showed that the virus was still circulating widely in Europe, though not with the rapidly growing infection rate seen in parts of the U.S., Latin America and India.

Poland and France, meanwhile, attempted a step toward normalcy as they held elections that had been delayed by the virus.

Wearing mandatory masks, social distancing in lines and carrying their own pens to sign voting registers, French voters cast ballots in a second round of municipal elections. Poles also wore masks and used hand sanitizer, and some in virus-hit areas were told to mail in their ballots to avoid further contagion.

“I didn’t go and vote the first time around because I am elderly and I got scared,” said Fanny Barouh as she voted in a Paris school.

In Texas, Abbott appeared with Vice President Mike Pence, who cut campaign events from upcoming visits to Florida and Arizona because of rising virus cases in those states.

Pence praised Abbott for both his decision to reopen the state, and to roll back the reopening plans.

“You flattened the curve here in Texas … but about two weeks ago something changed,” Pence said.

Pence urged people to wear masks when unable to practice social distancing. He and Abbott wore face masks as they entered and left the room, taking them off while speaking to reporters.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar, meanwhile, defended the fact that President Donald Trump has rarely worn a mask in public, saying he doesn’t have to follow his own administration’s guidance because as a leader of the free world he’s tested regularly and is in “very different circumstances than the rest of us.”

Addressing spikes in reported coronavirus cases in some states, Azar said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people “have to take ownership” of their own behaviors by social distancing and wearing masks if possible.

A reported tally Sunday from Johns Hopkins University researchers said the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic had reached 500,108.

About 1 in 4 of those deaths—more than 125,000—have been reported in the U.S. The country with the next highest death toll is Brazil, with more than 57,000, or about 1 in 9.

The true death toll from the virus, which first emerged in China late last year, is widely believed to be significantly higher. Experts say that especially early on, many victims died of COVID-19 without being tested for it.

To date, more than 10 million confirmed cases have been reported globally. About a quarter of them have been reported in the U.S.

The World Health Organization announced another daily record in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases across the world—topping over 189,000 in a single 24-hour period. The tally eclipses the previous record a week earlier at over 183,000 cases, showing case counts continue to progress worldwide.

Overall, the U.S. still has far and away the most total cases. At more than 2,450,000—roughly twice that of Brazil. The number of actual cases worldwide is much higher.

New York, once the nation’s pandemic epicenter, is now “on the exact opposite end,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in an interview with “Meet the Press.”

The state reported five new virus deaths Saturday, its lowest reported daily death toll since March 15. During the state’s peak pandemic in April, nearly 800 people were dying every day. New York still leads the nation in COVID-19 deaths with nearly 25,000.

In the state of Washington, Gov. Jay Inslee put a hold on plans to move counties to the fourth phase of his reopening plan as cases continue to increase. But in Hawaii, the city of Honolulu announced that campgrounds will reopen for the first time in three months with limited permits to ensure social distancing.

Britain’s government, meanwhile, is considering whether a local lockdown is needed for the central English city of Leicester amid reports about a spike in COVID-19 among its Asian community. It would be Britain’s first local lockdown.

“We have seen flare-ups across the country in recent weeks,” Home Secretary Priti Patel told the BBC on Sunday.

Polish voters were casting ballots, in person and by mail, for a presidential election that was supposed to have taken place in May but was chaotically postponed amid the pandemic. President Andrzej Duda, a 48-year-old conservative backed by the nationalist ruling Law and Justice party, is running against 10 other candidates as he seeks a second five-year term. Iwona Goge, 79, was encouraged to see so many people voting in Warsaw. “It’s bad. Poland is terribly divided, and people are getting discouraged,” she said.

French voters were choosing mayors and municipal councilors in Paris and 5,000 towns and cities in a second round of municipal elections held under strict hygiene rules. Key battlegrounds include Paris, where the next mayor will preside over the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Italy was honoring its dead later Sunday with an evening Requiem concert in hard-hit Bergamo province. The ceremony in the onetime epicenter of the European outbreak came a day after Italy registered the lowest daily tally of COVID-19 deaths in nearly four months: eight.

European leaders were taking no chances in tamping down new clusters. German authorities renewed a lockdown in a western region of about 500,000 people after about 1,300 slaughterhouse workers tested positive. Swiss authorities ordered 300 people into quarantine after a “superspreader” outbreak of coronavirus at a Zurich nightclub.

Africa’s confirmed cases of COVID-19 continued to climb to a new high of more than 371,000, including 9,484 deaths, according to figures released Sunday by the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Justice Department Issues Warning About Fake Mask Exempt Cards

Jason Slotkin reported that The Department of Justice has issued an alert about a card circulating online falsely claiming that holders are legally exempt from wearing a mask. Public health officials overwhelmingly recommend wearing a mask when going out in public.

Public health experts overwhelmingly agree that one of the best ways to slow the spread of the coronavirus is to wear a mask. Still, the seemingly straightforward recommendation to secure a covering over one’s nose and mouth has proven one of the pandemic’s more partisan issues.

The Department of Justice is now warning that a card circulating online is falsely claiming its holder is lawfully exempt from wearing a mask.

A recently issued alert by the department is urging the public not to heed information printed on the fraudulent cards, which purport to carry the authority of the “Freedom to Breathe Agency,” which is neither a federal nor a state agency.

The fake card states that wearing a mask will incur mental or physical risk for the holder. The card also posits that the Americans with Disabilities Act forbids raising questions about the health condition aggravated by mask usage. Penalties are threatened if a business owner does not act accordingly.

“If found in violation of the ADA you could face steep penalties. Organizations and businesses can be fined up to $75,000 for your first violation and $150,000 for any subsequent violations. Denying access to your business/organization will be also reported to FTBA for further actions,” the card reads, according to images that have been posted online.

At least some versions of the card appear to bear an official looking Justice Department insignia. In its alert, the department disavowed any role in the card’s creation or dispersal, saying, “These postings were not issued by the Department and are not endorsed by the Department.”

The department also said not to rely on information included on the card and instead to visit the Americans with Disabilities Act website.

It’s unclear how many cards are in circulation, but it appears to have been spread via a Facebook page belonging to a group calling itself the Freedom to Breathe Agency.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been recommending people wear cloth or fabric face coverings since April. Many states and localities have gone on to require or urge their wearing in public — especially in enclosed spaces. Businesses large and small have also adopted the recommendation, requiring both staff and customers to wear them.

Masks have emerged as a major political flashpoint — often in response to stay-at-home orders that state and local governments put in place to slow the outbreak. Despite his own government’s guidance, President Trump has said he will not be wearing a face mask, and protesters in multiple states have been seen without masks as they amassed in defiance at coronavirus restrictions.

In many online videos, staffers at food and retail establishments have been seen contending with customers who refuse to cover their faces.

The CDC — still — recommends wearing a mask when going out in public.

Dr. Saphier on prolonged school and summer camp closures: The mental health effects for kids are real

David Montanaro of Fox NewsFox reported that news medical contributor Dr. NicoleSaphier said Wednesday that the mental health effects on children during the coronavirus shutdowns are a real concern, as many summer camps have declined to open this year.

Speaking on “Fox & Friends,” Saphier said “94 percent of superintendents” across the country are not ready to talk about plans for reopening schools in the fall, raising concerns about the effects on children.

“This conversation is being prompted by surveys out of Italy and China where they reported that children were experiencing anxiety up to 70 percent of the time, saying that they were having feelings of anxiety or difficulty breathing. Those surveys were done from March and April. I would like to see more modern ones or more up-to-date ones. Let me tell you, as a mother having three kids at home, the mental health effects of these shutdowns are real,” she said.

Saphier said she’s concerned that the negative impact on children will be long-lasting if they continue to be kept at home rather than going to school. “Going to school for children is not just the fundamental basics of education. It’s learning conflict resolution, socialization skills and building the very necessary relationships and my biggest concern is that the mental health effects are going to be here to stay,” she said, adding that doctors have learned more about COVID-19, including that children are “significantly less susceptible to illness” and they are less likely to transmit the virus than adults.

“There are smart ways that schools can come together and get those kids back in session.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said last week that there is a “growing awareness” among Americans that kids need to go back to school as soon as possible and plans must be created to do that in a safe way.

In an interview on “America’s Newsroom” with hosts Sandra Smith and Ed Henry, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee pointed out that while kids must be kept safe from coronavirus, both children and their parents are “about up to here with remote learning.” “Any teacher or parent can tell you [about] the emotional [and] the intellectual impact, especially among minority kids,” Alexander told the “Newsroom” hosts.

“I mean, this is a time when we’re all talking a lot about racial injustice and disproportionate effects on low-income and minority kids. The single best thing we can do to help minority children [and] low-income children is to get them back in school. That’s where they learn. That’s where they learn to deal with other children. That’s where many get one meal, sometimes two,” Alexander concluded.

Dr. Fauci says George Floyd protests provide ‘perfect recipe’ for new coronavirus surges

Brie Stimson of Fox News noted that recent protests across the U.S. over the death of George Floyd could lead to new surges in coronavirus cases, Dr. Anthony Fauci  warned Friday.

“It is the perfect set-up for the spread of the virus in the sense of creating some blips which might turn into some surges,” Fauci, a member of President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, told radio station WTOP-FM in Washington, D.C.

“It is the perfect set-up for the spread of the virus in the sense of creating some blips which might turn into some surges.”

— Dr. Anthony Fauci 

His comments came as the U.S. edged closer to 2 million confirmed infections and 110,000 virus-related deaths, and the globe neared 7 million infections and 400,000 deaths since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University.

After months of confinement due to governors’ stay-at-home orders, thousands across the country have taken to the streets for more than a week to protest the police-custody death of Floyd – a black man who succumbed after a white officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes on May 25 in Minneapolis.

“As I sat in front of the TV and watched the screen go from Washington, D.C., to New York City, to Los Angeles, to Philadelphia, I got really concerned,” Fauci told the Sunday Times of London. “I was going, ‘Oh my goodness. I hope this doesn’t set us back a lot.’ [After] all of the work in trying to maintain the physical distance and doing all the things, I became very concerned that we might see a resurgence.”

While some in the massive crowds have worn masks, others haven’t — and no one is social distancing, he said.

The protests bring together people from different areas, many of them virus hotspots, Fauci said. The participants then return home and create a “perfect recipe” for a resurgence of the virus.

Chanting and yelling, as people typically do during protests, also increases the risk of spread, he said. “I get very concerned, as do my colleagues in public health, when they see these kinds of crowds,” Fauci said. “There certainly is a risk. I can say that with confidence.”

The only thing public health officials can do is constantly remind people to be careful and always wear a mask, Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told WTOP.

Officials in cities with protests have urged demonstrators to get tested for the virus. Cities such as Seattle and San Francisco have set up mobile testing centers for protesters. “It’s a difficult situation. We have the right to peacefully demonstrate and the demonstrators are exercising that right,” Fauci added. “It’s a delicate balance because the reasons for demonstrating are valid and yet the demonstration itself puts oneself at an additional risk.”

Note Well-Arizona’s rules for rationing healthcare in the COVID-19 pandemic should terrify you

Michael Hilzik pointed out a scary fact regarding the rationing of healthcare.  You may think that the coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes, are frightening enough. But Arizona has just activated a rulebook for rationing hospital care that is truly terrifying.

In brief, the rules allow hospitals to deny critical healthcare resources such as ventilators to patients based on medical judgments about their likelihood of living even five more years despite surviving COVID-19.

In practical terms, that means that on average, older adults are more likely to be denied care than younger persons. Those with medical conditions other than COVID-19 would be more vulnerable to denials than those judged to be healthier, whatever their age.

Health care planning must do everything possible never to need [Crisis Standards of Care].

National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine

Under the rules, doctors making triage judgments that deprive patients of necessary care will be immune from legal liability.

Arizona’s so-called crisis standards of care, or CSC, isn’t unique among the states. But it provides an up-to-the-minute look at the harsh choices facing medical personnel across the country thanks to our unfit and unprepared political leadership, if one can call it leadership at all.

From the federal government down through the states, the vacuum of leadership has exposed millions of Americans to sickness and death while reducing our healthcare system to a patchwork of overwhelmed facilities.

The lack of planning and preparedness is the outstanding failure of the response to the crisis in the United States. That’s the implicit judgment of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

The academies stated in an assessment of crisis standards of care in March that the primary principle was that “health care planning must do everything possible never to need CSC.”

The academies also specified that in the current pandemic, “public trust is essential.” That means that leaders would have to be “proactive, honest, transparent and accountable” when discussing the condition of their healthcare systems and institutions.

Has that happened? The answer obviously is no. President Trump and Republican governors such as Arizona’s Doug Ducey and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have suppressed statistics showing the true rate of infection in their states. Trump’s approach to the crisis has been focused in large part in trying to minimize its impact, even denying its existence.

States other than Arizona have similar rulebooks to be dusted off in a major emergency. Arizona, however, is the only state that has activated its crisis standard of care procedures — so far.

Arizona residents have been among the most resistant to wearing face masks in the coronavirus crisis. (Statista)

“A lot of states actually have activated their crisis standards of care plans,” Cara Christ, director of Arizona’s Department of Health Services, said during a press conference Monday with Ducey. That appears to be untrue. Though most states have prepared a crisis plan, no others have activated it.

Several, however, may be on the verge of doing so, at least regionally, since the surge in cases is placing immense stresses on local capacities. In California, for example, Riverside County’s ICU beds were reported to be 99% occupied over the weekend and Los Angeles County is projecting the possibility of running out of hospital beds in two to three weeks and exhausting its intensive care unit beds sometime in July.

In Imperial County, an agricultural county on the Mexican border where 23% of tests are coming back positive for COVID-19, 500 patients were transferred to adjoining counties to relieve the local pressure, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday.

California is one of several states ranking as leading hot spots of coronavirus infection, though its statewide test positivity average of 5.9% over the last seven days remains lower than other surging states such as Arizona (24.4%), Florida (15.6%) and Texas (14.1%).

All those states are guilty of having reopened commercial and retail establishments, as well as public facilities such as beaches, too soon — notably before it was clear that they had adequately clamped down on the community spread of the coronavirus.

Newsom has urged Californians to continue social distancing and mask-wearing throughout the crisis; his error was to give local officials too much latitude to decide for themselves when they could reopen their economies. Now Newsom is signaling that such deference may be coming to an end.

Newsom pressured Imperial County into rolling back its reopening, in part by threatening that “the state of California will assert itself and make sure that happens” if officials fail to do so. As my colleague Taryn Luna reports, he also has hinted at statewide orders aimed at imposing anti-virus rules, though he has not been specific.

In other states, governors have been more permissive and even interfered with local officials’ judgments. Until June 17, Ducey forbade cities and counties to impose stricter rules than the state. In practical terms, that prevented them from keeping bars, restaurants and retail establishments closed or requiring residents to wear masks in public.

Ducey relented under pressure from the mayors of Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff and in the face of an undeniable surge in COVID-19 cases.

The politicization of mask-wearing, a fundamental tool to defeat the virus, has hampered America’s response. (Yougov)

Ducey’s indulgent approach to social distancing measures probably contributed to his constituents’ failure to embrace them. Polls taken from late March through the end of April showed that only 30% to 40% of Arizona residents regularly wore face masks in public; in California, New York and New Jersey, the rate was as high as 60%.

Arizona waited until March 30 to issue a stay-at-home policy, long after other states. Ducey lifted the policy early, on May 15.

Ducey joined Trump at an indoor political rally in Phoenix on June 23 at which an estimated 3,000 persons were in attendance, crammed shoulder to shoulder and mostly maskless — even though a week earlier the city had ordered masks to be worn. Ducey wore a mask bearing the Arizona state seal, but Trump was maskless.

Not until Monday did Ducey reimpose anti-virus measures, prohibiting large gatherings, ceasing the issuance of new special event licenses, and closing bars, gyms, movie theaters, waterparks and tubing rentals. His order will remain in effect through the month. He didn’t order masks to be worn in public.

By then, the state already had activated its crisis standards of care, or rationing plan. Let’s take a look.

Like other states’ plans, Arizona’s relies chiefly on a metric known as a SOFA Score, for “sequential organ failure assessment.” The score is based on the condition of six major organ systems: lungs, circulatory, heart, kidney, liver and neurological.

Arizona assigns points to patients according to their SOFA score range, to a maximum of four points for the most severely affected. Then it adds up to four more points for a subjective assessment of a patient’s survivability: two points for those whose death is expected within five years despite successful treatment of COVID-19, and four for those whose death is expected within one year despite successful treatment. Priority for treatment is given to those with lower scores.

The guidelines state that judgments are to be made regardless of “race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, veteran status, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, quality of life, or any other ethically irrelevant criteria.”

But several of these factors obviously will play into the point system. Black patients on average tend to suffer from more medical conditions than others, in part because their incomes are lower on average and their access to medical care more limited. Older residents also suffer from more health challenges. And how do medical personnel assess a patient’s “quality of life”?

Some of these factors are especially relevant in Arizona, where residents 65 and older constitute 23% of the adult population, above the national average of 20.7%. Florida skews even older, with 25.6% of its adult population 65 and older.

The prospects of subjective judgments creeping into triage judgments is great because the SOFA score itself, despite its apparent objectivity, is an imperfect tool.

The scores are “poor predictors of individual patients’ survival,” the National Academies found in its assessment of crisis standards. That’s especially true for patients suffering acute respiratory failure, one of the key symptoms of COVID-19.

As a result, “these scores are not suitable for excluding patients with acute respiratory failure… from receiving critical care” in the pandemic.

One can’t blame Arizona for implementing a rationing plan aimed at delivering crisis care to those judged most likely to benefit from it. But its leaders can be blamed for allowing the state to reach the point where rationing is deemed necessary. The seeds of its disaster were planted long ago.

Fauci says new mutation of coronavirus spreads quickly: report

Jack Hobbs in the New York Post reported that the country’s top infectious disease expert said Thursday that a more infectious strain of the coronavirus may be emerging.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the claim Thursday in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Fauci said research suggests Italy was devastated by a different strain of the coronavirus than the one that originated in Wuhan, China.

The main difference between the two, Fauci said, is that Italy’s version passes from person to person more effectively, making it even more difficult to contain.

“It just seems that the virus replicates better and may be more transmissible,” says Fauci.

The study he references, which was released by researchers affiliated with the Sheffield COVID-19 Genomics Group, states that the new strain “has become the most prevalent form in the global pandemic.”
However, the researchers also found no evidence that this new strain causes worse symptoms than the original.

As of Thursday, The United States had more than 2.7 million confirmed cases, the highest in the world and Dr. Fauci also is warning us that the U.S. could see 100,000 Coronavirus cases a day if this surge continues.

What do we do to protect ourselves and conquer this disease?

And remember to celebrate Independence Day, the Fourth of July! Remember why we celebrate this holiday!