Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
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…
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…
How can we best accelerate vaccine availability? This is the question that Ahuja et al. (2021) try to answer in their Becker-Friedman Institute (BFI) working paper. First, they state the obvious: the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is large. Specifically: Each month, the COVID pandemic kills 300,000 people (as of Jan. 2021) and reduces global…