US posts a one-day high in COVID-19 cases with health systems on the verge of collapse
17 July 2020
With the United States leading the way as the worst-affected country, the number of coronavirus cases and deaths worldwide continues to soar, reaching 14 million infections today, and threatening to reach 600,000 total deaths by tomorrow. Yesterday, 5,736 more people succumbed to COVID-19, according to the Worldometer tracker.
Three countries, Brazil, India and the United States, account for more than 50 percent of all new cases. Yesterday, the United States posted its highest one-day number of new cases with 73,388 and 963 fatalities, approaching 3.7 million cases, with 141,000 deaths.
Almost alone among major countries, the United States has significant sections of its political elite who are acting as open advocates of spreading the virus so that the population will be forced to achieve “herd immunity,” regardless of the cost in human lives.
Cars forming a line for COVID-19 testing in Texas (Credit: Verónica G. Cárdenas)
This is the de facto policy of the capitalist ruling classes all over the world. But few have gone as far publicly as Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican allied with President Trump, who issued an executive order that combines pigheaded stupidity and criminal indifference to public health. It forbids city governments in his state to require the wearing of masks by people who are out in public places.
Perverting the slogan of “individual freedom,” Kemp explicitly singled out cities like Atlanta, Savannah, Athens and Augusta, whose mask requirements are now rescinded. Kemp upholds the “right” of the “free individual” to contract COVID-19 and then pass it on to friends, relatives, workmates, and people passing by in the street, without imposing the “heavy hand of government” through requiring a simple facemask.
Earlier in the month, over 1,400 health care workers signed a letter warning the governor that the state was ill-prepared to face a surge of new cases. Georgia reported 3,871 new cases on Thursday. At Navicent Health, the largest health care system in the state, a health worker told Georgia Public Broadcast News, “They were lined up along the walls in the ER … when you have to start shipping patients out of state, it's bad. When the hospitals are full, that's when it becomes really dangerous for everybody.”
Not only Georgia, but Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona and California are seeing a continuous influx of patients into emergency rooms. Except for California, these states are recording positivity rates in their COVID-19 testing above 15 percent with Arizona at 24 percent. These figures demonstrate that the pandemic is spreading uncontrollably through the population as a consequence of weeks of reopening businesses and encouraging people to resume normal activities and drop their guard against the killer virus.
Alabama's Lieutenant Governor Will Ainsworth publicly rebuked Governor Kay Ivey's statewide mandate to wear masks in public for a month. “The mandate is an overstep that infringes upon the property rights of business owners and the ability of individuals to make their own health decisions,” he declared.
Meanwhile, the number of cases in the state has exploded since the end of June. On Wednesday, Alabama reported its largest single day of deaths from COVID-19 with 47 fatalities. The Alabama Department of Corrections announced the death of two inmates on the same day. Thirty-four inmates have tested positive since July 10. Also, a COVID-19 outbreak at Alabama's largest food bank, serving 35 counties and over 300,000 residents, threatens their operations.
According to a recent 55-page report released by the Rockefeller Foundation, “America faces an impending disaster. The extraordinary scale of COVID-19 crisis is evident in the growing deaths and economic losses the pandemic has wrought in every state.” The report states that the US needs to reach the ability to perform 30 million tests a week with a turnaround time of 48 hours. Presently, the US is conducting 4.5 million COVID-19 tests a week with many patients having to wait more than seven days to get results. Mara Aspinall, a professor at Arizona State University and co-author of the report, said, “This is just unacceptable because, by the time you get test results back, you've already infected many, many people.”Louisiana reported 2,280 new cases of COVID-19 with 24 deaths. The demand for testing is skyrocketing, and the state is moving to cut back the number of tests available at community testing sites to preserve a critical supply, limiting them to people with COVID-19 symptoms. This is leading to delays in reporting, which many epidemiologists have noted confounds the ability to contact trace.
Many health professionals and public health officials have called for another lockdown to gain breathing room to deal with the growing crisis in earnest. However, the Trump administration and state governors, Democrat and Republican alike, are opposed to such measures. Even in Texas, where the state is facing a collapse of its healthcare infrastructure, Governor Greg Abbott walked back his assertion from last week that “the next step would have to be a lockdown.” He told KRIV-TV in Houston emphatically, “Let me tell you, there is no shutdown coming.”
On July 14, Texas posted a one-day high of 10,751 new cases. On July 15, it also grimly noted 110 new deaths, its highest one-day toll since the beginning of the pandemic. Meanwhile, several hard-hit counties in Texas are bringing in freezer trucks as makeshift morgues. ICUs and hospitals are attempting to find room in their facilities that are brimming with patients. Ambulances are on bypass or have to hold patients in their cabins for several hours before a bed is located for them. Many of these new COVID-19 patients come from low-income populations who have to work with their hands and suffer from chronic diabetes and high blood pressure.
Though the number of cases in Arizona seems to have plateaued, 90 percent of hospital beds are in use, and with the scarcity of resources, there is rationing of medical care. Dr. Murtaza Akhter, an emergency room medicine physician at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, said, “The fear is we are going to have to start sharing ventilators, or we're gonna have to start saying, 'you get a vent, you don't!' I'd be really surprised if, in a couple of weeks, we didn't have to do that.”
Several counties in southern California are also facing shortages of resources for COVID-19 patients. Like his Republican counterparts, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is putting into place half measures, closing some businesses and issuing a statewide mask mandate. Cases in the state of Washington are also on the rise. Since the middle of June, Washington has seen more than 700 new cases each day.
The pandemic’s impact would be multiplied many times over if states go ahead with plans to reopen public school systems in August and September, bringing 50 million children into an environment where they will be unable to social distance and otherwise protect themselves from infection, which will spread to teachers and other school staff, and will go home to parents, grandparents and other caregivers.
President Trump has threatened to cut funding from schools if they don't open. Asked by the press about his response to an Arizona teacher who contracted COVID-19 at a summer school and died, Trump seemed to feel nothing, and reiterated his demand that all schools reopen for five-day, in-person instruction. This is demanded by corporate America, in order to push through the back-to-work drive against the resistance of the working class.
The Democrats seek to profit politically from Trump’s obvious indifference to sickness and death, as well as the sheer incompetence of the White House response, but they represent the same class interests. No prominent Democrat is calling for a second national lockdown to stop the virus transmission and use the opportunity to begin the implementation of a broad public health initiative that would include mass testing, contact tracing and isolation of those who test positive.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, only one in four Americans believes it would be safe to reopen schools this fall, while more than half felt such a move would be dangerous. Forty percent of parents polled said they would probably keep their children home if classes are back in session.
At Monday's World Health Organization briefing, Dr. Mike Ryan replied as follows to a question on school openings, in words that apply most directly to the United States: “The problem we have in some countries right now is that it is very difficult to determine the safety of any environment because there is just so much transmission going on that all potential environments that people mix are essentially problematic … There are real issues in how schools can be reopened safely, but the best and safest way to reopen schools is in the context of low community transmission that has been effectively suppressed by a broad-based comprehensive strategy … Schools are a hugely important part of this. They are a hugely important part of our social, educational architecture. They are the baseline of our civilization, but we can't turn schools into yet another political football in this game.”
Millions of Americans are
losing health insurance as joblessness skyrockets
A health insurance claim form (Credit:
Flickr.com, franchise opportunities)
Millions of Americans are
losing health insurance as joblessness skyrockets
17 July 2020
Over the course of the past five months, millions of American
workers have lost their health insurance as the coronavirus pandemic has
ignited a jobs bloodbath and threatened wide layers of the population with
destitution.
Ever since mid-March, the United States has seen an exponential
spike in joblessness due to the acceleration of the pandemic’s spread. For 15
straight weeks, more than a million people have filed for unemployment
insurance. An estimated 32 million Americans are currently receiving federal
and state financial aid.
These conditions have produced a health care crisis of
unprecedented dimensions as more American workers have been stripped of
employer-based insurance at a number higher than any recorded full year of
insurance losses. The pandemic has left approximately 5.4 million American
workers uninsured between February and May, according to an analysis released
Tuesday by the nonpartisan consumer advocacy group Families USA. Their data
found that the number of uninsured during this period was nearly 40 percent
higher than the 3.9 million reported at the peak of the great recession of 2008
and 2009.
The study released under Families USA found that nearly 46
percent of the coverage losses from the pandemic came in only five states:
California, Texas, Florida, New York, and North Carolina. In Texas alone, the
number of uninsured rose from 4.3 million to nearly 4.9 million, and three out
of every 10 residents in Texas are considered uninsured.
For the 37 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable
Care Act, 23 percent of workers that were laid off became uninsured. This
percentage jumps to 43 percent in the 13 states that did not expand Medicaid,
including Texas, Florida, and North Carolina. It’s worth noting that both Texas
and Florida are experiencing massive surges of COVID-19 infections as a result
of the reckless and premature reopening plans prosecuted by the political
establishment.
Families USA also discovered that five states have experienced
increases in the number of uninsured adults that exceeded 40 percent. In
Massachusetts, one of the hardest hit states, the number of uninsured rose by
93 percent after business shutdowns and lockdown measures were imposed, which
accelerated the massive joblessness and removal from employer-based coverage.
Massachusetts has been one of the most significant hotspots for the spread of
the coronavirus since mid-March, with confirmed cases currently standing at
112,000 and nearly 9,000 deaths.
The report identifies eight states where 20 percent or more of
adults are without health insurance: Florida, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma,
Mississippi, Nevada, South Carolina and North Carolina. Of these states, all
except Oklahoma are among the 15 states that are experiencing the highest spike
in COVID-19 cases.
In addition to this analysis, Families USA notes that this
situation has worsened given the fact there is no federal relief program in
place that could reverse the harrowing conditions workers and their families
face. This neglect, they acknowledge, is the conscious policy of both
capitalist parties, which are well aware of the connection between insurance
and improved health outcomes, financial security, and economic recovery.
Even though official data won’t be released until 2021 when the
federal government produces its report on health insurance enrollments for the
previous year, current numbers from medical journals and scientific studies in
the US estimate that 16 percent of US adults, or 1 in 7, are without any health
insurance at all.
Authors of the Families USA research study borrowed data from
the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and raised alarm in their published paper on
the high rates of individuals without health insurance, stressing that this “is
particularly problematic during a pandemic involving a highly infectious,
deadly disease, especially in states that are allowing residents to be in
closer personal contact by attempting to reopen their economies” adding that
these are “often the same states that are now experiencing significant spikes
in COVID-19 infection rates.”
Health scientists and medical professionals have cited the
health dangers that the population faces not just due to the unabated spread of
the virus from the ruling class’ homicidal back-to-work agenda, but also the
harmful consequences of delays in diagnosis and treatment because of lack of
insurance for individuals and communities.
Diseases such as cancer and heart ailments “are more likely to
worsen until hospitalization is required or treatment becomes ineffective.” The
researchers continue by noting “losing health insurance thus makes permanent
health problems—and even early death—significantly more likely for conditions
unrelated to COVID-19.” These are forcing families that are already under
significant economic strain to decide between paying for critical medical
treatment out of pocket or buying other essential necessities.
In early May, the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF)
conducted an analysis that included workers who lost Employer-Sponsored
Insurance (ESI), and the potential consequences for those who lost dependent
coverage due to a family member losing a job and ESI benefits. That study
estimated that nearly 27 million people, including relatives and spouses,
signed on to a worker’s ESI could potentially become uninsured in the oncoming
months.
KFF noted that some individuals who otherwise lose ESI are able
to retain job-based coverage by switching to a plan offered to a family member.
This is only viable for a very small portion of people, 1.6 million, who have
another source of coverage in their family beyond their own loss of insurance.
Even with this maneuver, it’s incredibly unlikely in the US for someone to find
adequate healthcare coverage, if any at all. Data from the US Census Bureau
indicates that 27.5 million Americans had no health insurance in 2018.
Those who are losing coverage would face unsustainable costs if
they are struck with COVID-19, which has sent most of the seriously ill to
Intensive Care Units for weeks and some even months. The average cost to treat
a person with the novel coronavirus can range up to $30,000, according to a
released in April by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group of
insurers.
No comments:
Post a Comment