Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This weekend I received my second COVID-19 vaccine. While I certainly feel lucky to live in a country with ample vaccine supply, other countries are not so lucky. Let’s take a look at the numbers from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. These numbers are updated through May 2, 2021. First, you’ll see that…
Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and US Census Bureau, Woolf et al. (2021) find: Between March 1, 2020, and January 2, 2021, the US experienced 2 801 439 deaths, 22.9% more than expected, representing 522 368 excess deaths…The excess death rate was higher among non-Hispanic Black (208.4 deaths per 100 000) than non-Hispanic White…
To get people vaccinated for COVID-19, a lot of things have to go right. First, you have to have purchased the vaccine. Second, you need a supply chain to be able to deliver the vaccine. Third (or perhaps first) you need people who actually are interested in receiving the vaccine. As you can see from…
That is the title of my latest publication with co-authors Marlon Graf, Rifat Tuly, Christoph Glaetzer, Stacey Hickson, and Joey Mattingly. The subtitle is “How to Ensure Continued COVID-19 Vaccine Discovery and Expedite Access“. The abstract is below. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in a catastrophic burden in both health and economic…
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…
Who should get the COVID-19 vaccine first? Since I am an economist, let’s try to figure this out mathematically. Let’s give each person or group of people a score or ranking and vaccinate each individual in priority. One key factor, is that we should the vaccine to the people most at risk for the disease.…
On the eve of Martin Luther King Day, let us take a quick look at the impact of COVID-19 by race/ethnicity. CDC reports rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. One can see that cases are higher for most minorities (except Asians) relative to Non-Hispanic Whites, but hospitalizations and deaths are much higher for all…
It’s not great. From Nelson et al. (2009): Among those who received a first dose of varicella (n = 16 075), hepatitis A (n = 594 917), and hepatitis B (n = 590 445) vaccine, relatively few completed the series (55%–65% for hepatitis B vaccine and 40%–50% for hepatitis A and varicella vaccines in most…
The Economist has an interesting article on how Japan has been able to largely contain COVID-19. Part of the success has been a strong public health initiatives around avoiding the san-mitsu, or the “3Cs”. The 3Cs to avoid are: Closed spaces, Crowded places, and Close-contact settings. The phrase was blasted across traditional and social media.…
That is the conclusion from Woolf et al. (2020) in JAMA this past week. The authors examine rates of COVID-19 mortality in the US between March and October 2020 and compare them with other leading causes of death from March to October 2018. We see that COVID-19 is currently the 3rd leading cause of death…