The CDC is
releasing new guidance on return-to-work rules for critical workers
exposed to a COVID-19 case, or a suspected case, replacing previous
guidance to stay home for 14 days.
“One of the most important things we can do is keep our critical
workforce working,” CDC director Robert Redfield said at a White House
briefing Wednesday. “In certain circumstances they can go back to work,”
he said.
Neither Redfield nor the other governmental officials specified what
counts as an essential worker, although it has generally referred to
food-service and health care workers.
They must take their temperature before work, wear a facial mask at
all times and practice social distancing when at work, the new guidance
says. They cannot share headsets or other objects used near the face.
Employers must take the worker’s temperature and assess each one for
symptoms before work starts, sending a worker home if he or she is sick.
Employers must increase the cleaning of frequently used surfaces,
increase air exchange in the building and test the use of face masks to
be sure they do not interfere with workflow.
Pressed on whether he would re-open the country at the end of the
30-day Stop the Spread effort on April 30 — since one model has revised
the U.S. death toll down from 100,000-240,000 to 61,000 — President
Donald Trump said meetings will take place soon to discuss the decision
and that he will ”rely very heavily” on health experts.
“We know now for sure that the mitigation we have been doing is
having a positive effect,” said Anthony Fauci, MD, a coronavirus task
force member and director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases. Sources:
White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing, April 9, 2020.
CDC: “Implementing Safety Practices for Critical Infrastructure
Workers Who May Have Had Exposure to a Person with Suspected or
Confirmed COVID-19.” https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928492
The FDA grants emergency use authorization of Steris plc’s (NYSE:STE)
V-PRO 1 Plus, maX and maX2 Low Temperature Sterilization Systems to
decontaminate N95 or N95-equivalent respirators for reuse by healthcare
workers in hospital settings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company’s devices use hydrogen peroxide vapor to sterilize exposed surfaces.
LabCorp and CIox Health have teamed up to develop a comprehensive COVID-19 patient data registry.
The registry aims to allow researchers to better understand COVID-19
diagnoses and treatments and gain insight into more pandemic
preparedness efforts. The HIPAA-compliant registry will analyze
de-identified patient data.
LabCorp has performed about 500,000 COVID-19 tests since making one
available March 5. The testing data will be combined with medical record
data from Ciox Health’s DataFit platform.
“Healthcare practitioners and researchers need dynamic and real-time
insights about COVID-19 to address this healthcare crisis and develop
better treatment options for patients,” said Lance Berberian, chief
information and technology officer of LabCorp. “Combining life sciences
and data sciences, including artificial intelligence and natural
language processes, is the next frontier in the battle against the
virus. We hope that this groundbreaking registry inspires more research
and quickly results in improved outcomes for patients.”
As more data becomes available, LabCorp said it hopes to expand its
capabilities to foster a data coalition with healthcare providers and
public health organizations. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/data-analytics/labcorp-ciox-health-collaborate-on-covid-19-patient-data-registry.html
Amazon Web Services and the Yale School of Public Health are partnering
with nonprofit consortium Volunteer Surge to recruit and train 1
million volunteer healthcare workers online before sending them into the
field to help with COVID-19 care.
AWS will power the virtual learning platform, which volunteers will
use to complete a 30-hour online community health worker course
developed by the New Haven, Conn.-based Yale School of Public Health.
The initiative aims to offer communities across the country volunteer
support to free up physicians’ and nurses’ time to focus on the most
critical COVID-19 care operations.
“Task-shifting, which allows tasks to be delegated from doctors and
nurses to trained health workers, can reduce the burden on our system
and save lives by allowing scarce medical workers to focus on the more
serious COVID 19 care operations while trained healthcare volunteers
pick up other tasks,” Yale School of Public Health Dean Sten Vermund,
MD, PhD, said in a news release.
Once they have completed the virtual course, volunteers will take on
responsibilities including staffing drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites,
offering health support to home-bound seniors via telephone and taking
vital signs in tent triage centers. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/yale-teams-up-with-amazon-to-train-1-million-volunteer-healthcare-workers-online.html
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont issued an executive order that seeks to
stop patients from receiving out-of-network bills for COVID-19 treatment
and protect uninsured residents from large charges, according to The National Law Review.
Under the April 5 executive order,
hospitals are prohibited from billing uninsured patients for treatment
and management of COVID-19 in excess of what Medicare would pay. The
rule will stay in place unless and until an executive order regarding
federal funds to cover uninsured costs is issued. The Trump
administration said it is going to direct stimulus funds to hospitals to specifically help with uninsured costs related to COVID-19.
The Connecticut order also states if an emergency service is given to
a person by an out-of-network provider, the health plan should pay the
provider what in-network reimbursement would be. The directive is in
place for the duration of the pandemic.
Read the full article here. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/connecticut-orders-hospitals-to-limit-bills-to-uninsured-covid-19-patients.html
Here are eight medical schools that are allowing students to graduate
early to join the healthcare workforce amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Note: This is not an exhaustive list.
1. Ohio University‘s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and College of Health Sciences in Athens is graduating medical and nursing students early. The university said
the class of 2020 will receive their degrees April 18, rather than the
previously-scheduled dates of May 9 (Heritage College) and May 2
(nursing students), to allow them to join the healthcare workforce early
amid the pandemic.
2. Sixteen fourth-year medical students at the Icahn Institute of Medicine at Mount Sinai
in New York City will graduate early to help Mount Sinai Health System
hospitals as they experience a surge of COVID-19 patients, the health
system announced. Students will graduate on April 15 and then fulfill
short-term healthcare positions before beginning their residencies on
July 1.
3. The University of RochesterSchool of Medicine and Dentistrygraduated
its class of 2020 medical students about six weeks early. The
university said the physicians can work immediately during the COVID-19
pandemic, either at the university’s medical center or in other clinical
practices but are not required to start working early.
4. Harvard Medical School in Boston has given
fourth-year medical school students who have completed all their
training and degree requirements the option of graduating early,
according to the official news website
for the university. The regular graduation date is scheduled in May,
and those who choose to graduate early can do so before May.
5. One hundred twenty-two students in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University graduated
on April 8, two months early. The university said some of the graduates
will be deployed to the front lines amid the pandemic. Forty-nine
students will join the workforce at Stony Brook University Hospital on
April 13, and 14 will join the workforce at NYU Winthrop Hospital in
Mineola, N.Y.
6. Fifty-two fourth-year medical students at the University of Kansas School of Medicine volunteered to graduate early amid the pandemic, KCUR
reported April 3. According to the radio station, the early graduates
will be assigned to areas of Kansas with the greatest need and receive
special permits to practice from the state board of healing arts.
7. The NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City is allowing
students to graduate a few months early. Students who take the option
to graduate early will begin working in NYU Langone’s internal medicine
or emergency medicine departments in April instead of the typical July 1
start date.
8. The University of Arizona College of Medicine — Phoenix will allow fourth-year medical students to graduate early, the university confirmed to Becker’s. The university said 28 fourth-year medical students had met the early graduation requirements as of April 10. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-physician-relationships/8-medical-schools-allowing-early-graduation-to-boost-covid-19-workforce.html
The
numbers seem catastrophic, overwhelming, beyond a magnitude that the
human mind or heart can grasp: What do 60,000 — or even 240,000 — deaths
look like?
Those are roughly the lower and upper limits of projected fatalities in the U.S. from Covid-19
in models that have been informing U.S. policy. Last month, when the
lower estimate was 100,000, the White House recommended nationwide
countermeasures. Those started with a ban on gatherings and quickly
escalated to closing schools and businesses, advising people to wear face masks,
and reminding them to stay physically apart. This week, when the lower
estimate (from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) dropped
to 60,000, reflecting how well those measures are working, it stoked optimism that the epidemic might soon end with less loss of life.
The lower number, 60,000, is a little more than the capacity of
Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. It is the number of passengers in 180
full jumbo jets. It is more than the number of U.S. combat deaths in the
Vietnam War.
And 240,000, of course, is four times any of the above.
But are these large numbers or small numbers? At the beginning of the
pandemic’s spread in the U.S., President Trump dismissed early
projections of thousands, even tens of thousands, of U.S. deaths as no
worse than the lives lost in an average influenza year. So far this
season, flu deaths total 24,000 to 63,000 (data from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention are estimates with wide uncertainties).
Whether you think a multiple of up to 10 on top of that is a tragedy
or merely unfortunate is a personal call. For what it’s worth, about
8,000 Americans die every day from, almost overwhelmingly, diseases and
other natural causes. Those, of course, haven’t stopped; Covid-19 deaths
are in addition to those (with a caveat noted below).
To make these numbers easier to grasp, we show how 60,000 to 240,000
compares to some of the leading causes of death and to previous
pandemics. Hyacinth Empinado/STAT
One note about methodology: The projected Covid-19 deaths come from
models that see the number of cases and deaths plateauing nationally in
the next few weeks, as they have already done in Seattle, San Francisco,
and other places that were hit first. If stay-at-home orders and other
countermeasures keep working, there should be few deaths after July. We
therefore treated the 60,000 to 240,000 deaths as occurring over five
months, from March to July, as the IHME researchers do, and therefore
calculated five months worth of cancer, heart disease, and other deaths.
Of course, as Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House Covid-19 task
force, told a JAMA webcast this week, the new coronavirus “is not going
to disappear from the planet, for sure,” after July.
But the concentration of deaths is “truncated into weeks,” said
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases. That is what captures our attention and overwhelms hospitals. Hyacinth Empinado/STAT
Covid-19 is particularly severe in — and more likely to kill — the
elderly and people with existing illnesses, including heart disease.
Some people taken by Covid-19 would likely have died from these diseases
even in the five-month time frame. We do not try to calculate how many
of the Covid-19 deaths “substitute” for other deaths; that is an
important calculation that researchers will be eager to do once the
crisis passes.
You may believe a different methodology paints a truer picture of how
Covid-19 deaths compare to others. As we said, how to think about
deaths is deeply personal.
