Links
How are mosquitos benefiting from COVID-19. Sweden. Explaining Gödel’s proof. L.A. Teachers Union response to COVID-19: end charter schools? defund the police? COVID-19 vaccine = hope-driven hype?
Month: July 2020
Creating Incentives To Narrow The Gap In Health Outcomes
That is the title of my recent blog post in Health Affairs with my co-author Meena Venkatachalam. The subtitle is “Expanding Value Assessment To Incorporate Health Inequality“. An excerpt is below: The brutal murder of George Floyd has brought renewed attention to systemic inequality that African Americans and other minorities face in the United States…
LA: Distance learning only
The New York Times reports: California’s two largest public school districts said on Monday that instruction would be online-only in the fall, in the latest sign that school administrators are increasingly unwilling to risk crowding students back into classrooms until the coronavirus is fully under control.The school districts in Los Angeles and San Diego, which…
Some good news
As COVID-19 cases continue to rise in the US, there was some good news last week from this year’s AIDS conference. Due to COVID-19, the conference had to be held remotely. One policy goal is known as the 90:90:90, which means to identify 90% of HIV cases, treat 90% of those identified and supress viral…
Friday Links
Long waits for COVID-19 tests. Quantifying the benefits of the Clean Air Act. Pooled testing. Double dipping? Excess deaths trends.
What explains the decline in COVID deaths despite the rising number of cases?
Take a look at these two graphs. The first gives the number of new COVID-19 cases from John Hopkins University. It is a scary graph. The second graph is the number of COVID deaths from IHME. Not nearly as bad. CDC reported death numbers are similar. In fact, the number of deaths in recent weeks…
Disparities in COVID-19 hospitalization rates
Azar et al. (2020) use electronic health record data to examine differences in COVID-19 hospitalization rates by patient characteristics. The authors find that: …compared with non-Hispanic white patients, nonHispanic African American patients had 2.7 times the odds of hospitalization, after adjustment for age, sex, comorbidities, and income. These findings echo similar COVID-19-related conclusions across California.…
Should employers ban soda?
A paper by Basu et al. (2020) argue that banning soda sales would be cost effective for employers. Employers largely bear the cost of adverse health impacts of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB, aka soda); they also may lose revenue if drinks that are sold on site (e.g., at their cafeteria) decrease. The researchers create a simulation…
Treatment effect heterogeneity, self-selection into RCTs, and racial disparities
In drug development, clinical trials typically aim for a population that is representative of the patients who would be eligible for the treatment. While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) typically focus on measuring the average health impact of a drug across this population, a paper Basu and Gurjal (2020) argue that treatment effect heterogeneity and self-selection…
Links
Why payers support prior authorizations. Russia health care fact of the day. Doug Glanville, comma. “Schizophrenia is not a casserole illness.” Mortality vs. new cases.