Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
An interesting discussion from This American Life (“The Herd“, transcript) talking about the origin of the term “communicable disease” with respect to public health monitoring for the 1918 flu pandemic. Ira Glass: Howard says [St. Louis Commissioner of Health] Dr. Starkloff had all kinds of messages, telling people to wash their hands, don’t cough on…
We have heard much about how COVID-19 has created a paradigm shift in the use of telemedicine. A paper by Patel et al. (2021) uses claims data between January 1, 2020, to June 16, 2020 to measure this trend quantitatively. They find that in a largely commercially-insured population: In the COVID-19 period, 30.1 percent of…
Looks like more good news on the COVID-19 vaccine front. Dr. Fauci’s prediction that the Pfizer/BioNTech foreshadowed positive news for future vaccines appears to have come true. Stat News reports: The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s…
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…
Great news on progress for a COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer. From their press release: Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants Study enrolled 43,538 participants,…
That is the key question explored in a recent article from The Economist titled “Masked up, ready to battle bugs“. As individuals in developing nations leave crowded cities for fear of COVID, they may be at more risk for malaria due to the presence of more standing water (which attracts malarial mosquitos) used for irrigation…
Dasgupta et al. (2020) compares individual behavior in the COVID-19 pandemic with the 1665 London plague outbreak based on the descriptions by Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Year of the Plague. The historical comparison is interesting throughout and merits a full read. Some excerpts are below. On the failure to recognize the disease’s…
Bütikofer and Salvanes (2020) in The Review of Economic Studies: This article examines the economic impact of a tuberculosis control program launched in Norway in 1948. In the 1940s, Norway had one of the highest tuberculosis infection rates in Europe, affecting about 85% of the inhabitants. To lower the disease burden, the Norwegian government launched…
STAT News has an excellent article evaluating where we are on the federal initiative to fast track the development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. To date, the fastest a vaccine was ever developed was four years. Operation Warp Speed, or OWS, has already spent about $10 billion to help vaccine makers develop their candidates…
Based on an a medRχiv working paper by Vu by et al. (2020), the answer from an analysis of other emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The authors analyze hypothetical investment returns of a portfolio of 141 pre-clinical emerging infectious disease (EID) vaccine development programs across different emerging infections without a vaccine. These…