Viewpoints: No Admittance Policy For Caregivers Is Harming Vulnerable Patients; Time To Demand Equal Access — Not Just The Rich — For COVID-19 Testing

Stat: Hospitalized Adults Need Their Caregivers — They Aren’t Visitors 
Social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine: These are among the essential public health interventions for the Covid-19 pandemic. As we use these strategies, we must also minimize their harms to the people they’re intended to protect. One such person is my uncle. (Jason Karlawish, 3/29)

Boston Globe: Coronavirus Doesn’t Discriminate. Neither Should Testing And Treatment. 
In a life-or-death crisis, judgments are made about which lives are deemed worthy. Given the longstanding racial disparities in health care and treatment in this country, that’s especially alarming for people of color and those in poverty during a pandemic. (Renée Graham, 3/27)

The New York Times: Doctors Must Ration Ventilators As Coronavirus Rages. The Decisions Are Painful.
This is the moment to pray for the psychological welfare of our health care professionals. In the months ahead, many will witness unimaginable scenes of suffering and death, modern Pietàs without Marys, in which victims are escorted into hospitals by their loved ones and left to die alone. I fear these doctors and nurses and other first responders will burn out. I fear they will suffer from post-traumatic stress. And with the prospect of triage on the horizon, I fear they will soon be handed a devil’s kit of choices no healer should ever have to make. It’s a recipe for moral injury. (Jennifer Senior, 3/29)

Los Angeles Times: If Hospitals Overflow With Coronavirus, Who Gets Treated?
The COVID-19 catastrophe is about to require Americans to make tough decisions for how to allocate scarce resources that can determine life and death. This is especially true with ventilators and beds in intensive care units. Many hospitalized patients in ICUs are dying of cancer or advanced irreversible dementia, or are on ventilators because of irreversible heart, lung or liver failure. In a large proportion of these kinds of cases, the physicians caring for the patient recognize that death is imminent, but treatment continues, often because families are unwilling to recognize the inevitable. (Neil S. Wenger and Martin F. Shapiro, 3/26)

Boston Globe: Coronavirus Should Be A Testing Ground For Telemedicine’s Potential
Long before the coronavirus outbreak, health care providers and policy makers saw promise in telemedicine. Providing care by phone or video call can be a way to reach patients in underserved areas — and, potentially, to save money in the health care system. Now, by necessity, telemedicine is getting a huge unexpected test run. If this experiment works, it should accelerate the acceptance of remote health care after the pandemic subsides. (3/29)

The Wall Street Journal: An Update On The Coronavirus Treatment
In the fight against Covid-19 though we might look forward in doom, one day we will look backward in awe. In an article last week, I discussed a promising drug combination to treat the disease. There is now new data supporting this treatment. Since then, Kansas City area physicians, including Joe Brewer, Dan Hinthorn and me, continue to treat many patients, and some have shown improvement. Major medical centers including the University of Washington and Mass General have added hydroxychloroquine to treatment options. So here’s an update, a response to some questions that have come up, and suggestions based on the latest information. (Jeff Colyer, 3/29)

WBUR: If You Get Critically Ill With COVID-19, How Far Should Doctors Go To Keep You Alive? 
As physicians, we are familiar with the difficult decisions that our patients and their families have to make when faced with critical illness. The urgency of these decisions is even more amplified by the unprecedented and rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic. We fear that many of our patients may end up being hospitalized and confronted with challenging questions — like if they would like to be kept alive on a ventilator, or to have cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) done — and have not had conversations about this in advance. (Abraar Karan and Evan Shannon, 3/26)

CNN: The Covid-19 Culprit Is Us, Not Pangolins
Early in the SARS outbreak, some 17 years ago, I was in Beijing and Guangzhou with an international team of scientists assembled by the World Health Organization. In live animal markets, the civet cat was a commodity. The mammal, which resembles a mongoose more than a cat, is a culinary delicacy in China and was believed to have health benefits. (Robert F. Breiman, 3/27)

The New York Times: What Social Distancing Looked Like In 1666
A lot of English people believed 1666 would be the year of the apocalypse. You can’t really blame them. In late spring 1665, bubonic plague began to eat away at London’s population. By fall, roughly 7,000 people were dying every week in the city. The plague lasted through most of 1666, ultimately killing about 100,000 people in London alone — and possibly as many as three-quarters of a million in England as a whole. Perhaps the greatest chronicler of the Great Plague was Samuel Pepys, a well-connected English administrator and politician who kept a detailed personal diary during London’s darkest years. He reported stumbling across corpses in the street, and anxiously reading the weekly death tolls posted in public squares. (Annalee Newitz, 3/29)

CNN: Covid-19 Will Change Us As A Species 
I turned 61 last week, and am now, along with millions of others across the globe, within the higher risk group for Covid-19. Before this turn of events, ours had been the generation that had, along with billions of others younger and slightly older than me, avoided a major global crisis. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we didn’t face the tragedy of living through two World Wars; we avoided nuclear warfare during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Cold War. Now, our luck has run out. (Marcelo Gleiser, 3/27)

The Hill: Students With Disabilities Could Lose With COVID-19 Stimulus Package
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, is the nation’s federal special education law. It provides funding, technical assistance and monitoring to ensure students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate education. With the new COVID-19 stimulus package, the U.S. Congress will provide Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos with the right to provide waivers to states for the IDEA implementation. As a researcher in the area of education policy, I think this is extremely concerning. If DeVos’ past behavior has any predictive value for her future decisions related to equitable educational policies, then families of children with disabilities across the country should also be highly concerned. (David DeMatthews, 3/29)

Los Angeles Times: My Mom Is A Hypochondriac. I Know Coronavirus Fear Is Its Own Disease
Two weeks ago, when restaurants were still open, I watched a friend at lunch repeatedly spritz his hands with hand sanitizer. It seemed more compulsion than prudent protective measure. If he keeps this up for the duration of this pandemic, I thought, there’s a good chance the skin on his hands might not hold up. In a market, I saw a man load 50 rolls of toilet paper into two carts, elbowing others away, as if his life depended on this act of hoarding. (Deborah A. Lott, 3/27)

CNN: Justice Department Should Charge Intentional Coronavirus Spreaders As Terrorists
This week, the Justice Department took an aggressive step toward holding individuals who knowingly spread the coronavirus accountable for their actions. The new guidance could serve as a powerful deterrent to those contemplating weaponizing the virus in the weeks ahead. In an official memo, the Justice Department indicates that those who intentionally spread Covid-19 could be charged on terrorism-related charges, because the virus “appears to meet the statutory definition of a ‘biological agent.'” And the charges, in some cases, could lead to life imprisonment. (Samantha Vinograd, 3/26)

Charlotte Observer: Coronavirus: NC Lags Behind Other States With COVID-19 Data 
At least once each day, North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services updates its data on coronavirus cases in our state. To get those DHHS numbers, simply go to the department’s coronavirus page, where you can find the current official NC case count, number of COVID-19 deaths, and the number of completed public and commercial tests. You also can find the number of cases and deaths in each county on a map below.It’s helpful information, and DHHS has served North Carolina well with the availability of secretary Mandy Cohen, who has directly and thoughtfully answered questions in news conferences during the crisis. But residents of other states are getting information about the coronavirus that North Carolinians aren’t. (3/27)

Tampa Bay Times: Time To Hunker Down, Tampa Bay
Daily life as we know it changed remarkably Friday, as Tampa Bay entered the first full weekend under stay-home orders aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus. The new restrictions on where and how we can shop, do business and play will certainly hurt some workers and limit any relief the weekend can bring to the ongoing public malaise, but all 2.4 million residents in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties have an obligation to adhere to the orders and act responsibly. This is a test of patience and common sense for residents and government alike, and the more a collective attitude prevails, the faster and better the region will emerge from the pandemic. (3/27)

Miami Herald: Florida Governor Blocks Herald Reporter From Briefing
Gov. Ron DeSantis denied Mary Ellen Klas, a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times reporter in Tallahassee, access to his coronavirus press conference on Saturday. It was vindictive, petty — and illegal. He should be ashamed — not because he thinks he put one over on a reporter, the Times or the Herald. No, to them it’s not personal. Rather, he should be ashamed because, in not allowing Klas to do her job and ask the serious questions that deserve his serious answers, he is really denying access to the Floridians who look to these media outlets for vital information. There’s no denying it: DeSantis, like some — but not other, more-conscientious — Republican governors, is taking his marching orders from President Trump, who is still downplaying the intensity of COVID-19’s grip on the nation, ignoring medical experts and playing politics with Americans’ very lives. After all, the president had threatened to hold coronavirus aid hostage unless certain governors who have criticized him play nice. (3/29)

CNN: The Alarming Message Of Louisiana’s Sharp Rise In Covid-19 Cases 
The explosion of cases in New Orleans, Louisiana, has caught the attention of Covid watchers and doomsayers across the country. Less than two weeks ago, the Crescent City recorded less than 100 cases. By March 29 the number of infections in Orleans Parish reached 1,350, with 73 deaths. The fatalities per capita rivals that of New York City. Though all eyes are on New Orleans, an equally alarming outbreak is occurring in a smaller city in the northwest of the state. (Kent Sepkowitz, 3/29)

Los Angeles Times: Dear Los Angeles: You Still Need To Pick Up Your Dog’s Poop
Even though we’re in the middle of a deadly pandemic, you still have to pick up after your dog. Each. And. Every. Time. It. Poops. Many of you did not abide by this basic tenet of dog ownership before the coronavirus struck. Fewer of you seem to be abiding by it now — if my neighborhood strolls and those of Twitter users across the country are any indication. (Matthew Fleischer, 3/25)