Congress is on a State / district work period at least until April 20 as a form of social distancing. Congress nevertheless can take action by unanimous consent measures from afar. The Wall Street Journal reports on bumpy bi-partisan efforts to craft a fourth COVID-19 relief bill.
The Affordable Care Act regulators have issued FAQ 42 on concerning “implementation of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (the FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (the CARES Act), and other health coverage issues related to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).” The FAQs cover COVID-19 coverage issues for group and individual health plans as well as employee assistance plan and telehealth issues.
The Wall Street Journal helpfully wrote about how to obtain healthcare for issues other than COVID-19 during this emergency.
Don’t assume doctors are too busy for you. Doctors are converting their practices to telemedicine quickly to address more ailments, so there is no need to suffer in silence. Call your doctor and together make a plan that addresses both your medical need and your concern for protection from the coronavirus.
“Doctors have switched their business model on the fly,” says Fred Feuerbach, a cardiologist and assistant attending physician and clinical instructor of medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, who is monitoring some patients through daily phone calls and FaceTime visits. “Patients should know doctors are available,” he says.
According to the article, the same approach applies to seeking dental care. The article also discusses women’s health care, vision care, orthopedics, and allergy and vision care during the great hunkering down. The across the board advice is to avoid emergency rooms now.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the expansion of serological / blood testing for COVID-19 antibodies.
“To date, we have had no clue how many people have been infected,” said Eran Bendavid, an infectious-disease physician at Stanford University. “This could be an extraordinarily important piece of how we’re going to get over this epidemic.”
In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration granted the first emergency authorization for one of the blood tests last week, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it has started using its own test. The U.S. could have a “rather large number of tests” available within a week, provided extra checks show them to be accurate, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN.
Reason Magazine discusses a serological test study conducted in a German hot spot.
Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80 percent of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they’d been infected by the coronavirus. Around 15 percent had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37 percent. The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a while.
This preliminary study illustrates the promise of these serological tests in gauging the lifting of the great hunkering.
The FEHBlog noted recently about a new rapid COVID-19 test development by Abbott Labs. According to this Wall Street Journal article, the federal government bought a boatload of the machines and distributed them among the States and other U.S. jurisdictions. However, Abbott has experienced a backlog in manufacturing the test cartridges to be read on the machines, notwithstanding producing 50,000 cartridges daily. On the bright side,
Detroit, was able to buy and deploy a large number of Abbott’s rapid tests shortly after the company got approval from the FDA on March 27. The quick results helped reshape the city’s response to the virus.
Since the start of the month, Detroit has administered more than 1,000 tests, initially focusing on first responders and bus drivers who had been in quarantine, said John Roach, a spokesman for the mayor. The city has already purchased 4,000 additional tests from Abbott and recently said that rapid tests would be used at nursing homes and homeless shelters.
Well done, Detroit.