A revolution is occurring in the way medical care is being delivered in the United States. It is happening almost overnight. People have stopped going to hospital emergency rooms. They have stopped going to doctors’ offices. Most of the nation is self-isolating. Doctors and patients are no exception. They are communicating by means of phone, email, Skype, Zoom and other devices. Last December, Zoom was the host of 10 million video conferences a day. Last week, the company was hosting 200 million a day. Many of those were patient/doctor communications.
Author: John C. Goodman
Is the Government Anti-Gay?
Writing at Slate, Andy Carstens asks why there is a difference in the government’s response to Covid and the response to HIV. On Jan. 18, the government launched a website enabling every U.S. household to order four free at-home kits … And, while the future of government COVID test funding is shaky, right now households can order another set of four free tests.
New Partnership: Health Care News
Because of budget shortfalls, the Heartland Institute suspended publication of Health Care News in March, 2020. Fortunately, the Goodman Institute for Public Policy stepped in to partner with Heartland to ensure the newspaper’s survival going forward. In an election year, this new partnership could not have come at a better time.
Kotlikoff: Beating COVID-19 with Math
A strategy for extinguishing the novel coronavirus has been outlined by Cornell University’s Operations Research Professor Peter Frazier and colleagues. They developed a group testing protocol that could release 96 percent of the U.S. population back to society within four weeks, with this percentage rising even higher thereafter. Frazier envisions initially testing 62 households at a time, and assumes, to be conservative, a very high (30 percent false negative) test rate that would require some degree of redundancy to work efficiently. All told, though, the job could be done for the entire United States with only 6 million tests per week. That’s a large number, but just three to four times the test rate we’ve already reached.