Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
This is the title of a paper published in Letters in Biomathematics with colleagues Anuj Mubayi, Jeff Sullivan, Oliver Diaz, Aditi Ghosh, Anamika Mubayi, Olcay Akman, and Phani Veeranki. The subtitle is: “The Coupled Dynamics of the COVID-19 Pandemic with Social Epidemics“. The abstract is below. Policymakers are under intense pressure to respond effectively to…
Telemedicine and video-conferencing are helping to bridge the gap in access to care during the COVID-19 pandemic. These approaches, however, only work if patients have access to the technology needed to engage in telemedicine or videoconference visits. A paper by Roberts and Mehrota (2020) uses data from the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) and finds…
COVID-19 is a global pandemic and finding a vaccine for COVID-19 would be a boon to societal. The value would be enormous. One study found that the value would be more than 1.1% of GDP. Since global GDP is $87.7 trillion, the value of a vaccine would be nearly $1 trillion. In a recent colloquium…
That is based on an event study approach from a recent Health Affairs article by Lyu and Wehby (2020). Specifically, Mandating face mask use in public is associated with a decline in the daily COVID-19 growth rate by 0.9, 1.1, 1.4, 1.7, and 2.0 percentage points in 1–5, 6–10, 11–15, 16–20, and 21 or more…
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…
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…
That is the title of my commentary with co-authors Kathy Lang and Ross Maclean in the Journal of Clinical Pathways. The abstract is below. What is the right price for a new treatment for COVID-19? One common approach—which is frequently used worldwide and in the United States by the Institute of Clinical and Economic Review—measures…
Health insurance companies are not spending as much money as expected. While COVID-19-related costs are up, the cost savings from people foregoing or delaying elective care has more than offset the COVID costs. Health insurers are refunding much of that savings to their enrollees. However, this is due to a provision of the ACA that…
That are the results from a recent Washington Post-ABC News survey. It is pretty dispiriting that only 71% of people will probably or definitely get a vaccine. Is this because people are not scared of COVID? No. In general, most people are concerned. 63% of people say they are very or somewhat worried that they…