Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How does quarantining impact COVID-19 deaths? Just comparing individuals who did compared to did not quarantine is problematic since this will be a non-randomized sample. Individuals who adhere to quarantine recommendations may be more careful overall (e.g., better mask adherence, less likely to be smokers, conduct more preventive care) and thus the benefits of quarantining…
A paper by Ahmad and Anderson in JAMA last spring examined trends in the causes of death in the US. Below are the charts in terms of both the number of deaths and the share of total deaths. The data come from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The…
If you want to learn more about what went wrong for America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a great book to read is Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic. Gottlieb is a physician, a former FDA commissioner, and a member of the National Academy of…
While the recently developed COVID-19 vaccines offer the hope of ending the pandemic, ending the pandemic is only feasible if individuals take the vaccine. In the US, a large portion of individuals report being hesitant to receive the vaccine. A key question then is whether individuals living in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) are have…
What do the vaccination rates look like in the largest U.S. cities? In these cities, how do the characteristics of individuals in neighborhoods with low vs. high vaccination rates differ? To answer this question, a paper by Sacarny and Daw (2021) use data from 9 large US cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix,…
Getting from a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to scaling to manufacture these vaccines for billions of people is far from simple: Manufacturing mRNA vaccines for the first time in a very short timeframe required significant innovation and remains a technically challenging endeavor. The process proved to be technically challenging as Pfizer developed a 50,000 step process.…
Today teams in the National Football League (NFL) made their final roster cuts. In most years, your ability to make the final roster of an NFL team is dependent on one factor: how well can you play football. This year, however, some teams used additional criteria to determine whether a player made the team. ESPN…
A few updates on COVID-19 from where I am living. First while we see a dramatic decline in COVID-19 infections and deaths, there is a fair amount of regional variation within California. The Sacramento Bee reports that: The average number of new COVID infections reported each day dropped by an astounding 98% from December to…
Many Medicare payment initiatives aim to link reimbursement to value. Value includes both cost and quality of care. However, measuring quality of care during a pandemic is problematic. Further, most of CMS’ value-based purchasing programs–such as Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) and the Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program all…
People are not just dying from COVID, but the quarantine’s–while necessary–did exacerbate mental health issues for many individuals. This is especially true for individuals who suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia. This American Life‘s had a recent episode showing how isolation likely accelerated the downward spiral of the narrator’s grandmother, who suffered from dementia. The Alzheimer’s…