Coronavirus and Healthcare
How can you have a blog and not write about the obvious? The obvious is how life has changed lately; for me and everyone else. I have written three articles now about coronavirus/COVID 19.
This afternoon, I was in a town-hall-style webinar of medical professionals from across the U.S. and northern Italy. The depth of the challenge that this virus poses for hospitals is not fully understood or appreciated by the public. It is monumental.
As in Italy, over the past month or so, the numbers of confirmed new cases of COVID 19 in the U.S. will skyrocket. The American healthcare system will be overwhelmed as the Italian system has been. Doctors in northern Italy have had to face a terrible reality; which patients live and which die. The numbers of ventilators, required for critically ill patients is limited in Italy, as they are in the U.S. There are not just a few too few, but the numbers available are only a fraction of what will be required in the weeks ahead. When a patient can’t breathe on their own, and there isn’t a ventilator available to help them breathe, they will die. This reality has repeated itself thousands of times over already in Italy and it will impact the U.S. healthcare system the same way.
As of today, March 24, 2020, there are 417,698 confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide. It is believed that a fairly large percent of the cases in China are not included in this number. It is also believed that a much larger number of people who are infected have not yet been tested. The very sad figure is that there have been 18,614 deaths worldwide resulting from COVID 19, including 6,820 in Italy, 3,160 in Hubei, China, 2,808 in Spain, 1,934 in Iran and 1,100 in France. This number increases by discouraging jumps every single day. It is now more than 6 times the number of people killed on 9/11.
In the U.S., the total number of confirmed cases is 53, 268, putting the U.S. in third place globally in terms of confirmed cases. This number will only grow exponentially as more tests are performed on people who are showing symptoms of the disease. The U.S. now has 696 deaths, with clusters of extreme community spread in New York City, King County, Washington State, Suffolk, New York, and other urban areas of the country.
An Apocalypse for Older People
The news media and experts in White House news conferences trumpet the good news that 80% of those dying are 65 or older. Younger people can relax to some extent.
That is little consolation to those of us in the baby-boom generation who are in the high-risk category. They also say that most of the people admitted to the ICU, in hospitals in Europe and the U.S. are “older.” What they miss is that those of us “older” adults care about our lives and health as well as anyone else. In the U.S., according to the CDC, as of today 31-70% of adults 85 years old and older and 31-59% of adults 65-84 years old, have required hospitalization after infection with coronavirus.
The number become more dismal when you realize the number who are admitted to the ICU in very critical condition. Those numbers are 6-29% of adults 85 years old and older and 11-31% of adults 65-84 years old. Of course, as concerning a number as those are, it is the numbers of those “older” people who are dying. While the worldwide figure for all age groups sits just above 5% of the confirmed cases, the figures for those above 65 read like a death sentence. The CDC says that 10-27% of adults 85 years old and older and 4-11% of adults 65-84 years old will die after contracting COVID 19. This disease is simply decimating portions of the baby-boom and older generations. The loss of older adults in northern Italy is one of the world’s worst tragedies.
Economic Devastation
In addition to the loss of life, there is the economic toll the pandemic has taken on the U.S. and the world. Unemployment in my own county is up more than 800%. Nationally, job loss is rampant and the stock market had ended an 11-year bull market rally to plunge into a bear market. The U.S. and the world have been cast into a recession, after a period in America of record-low 3.5% unemployment and wage increases. Restaurants, entertainment venues, theme parks, airlines and cruise companies are all hard-hit and many small businesses are closing their doors. Even the Tokyo Olympics were postponed.
In that webinar today, one of the healthcare professionals, privy to information that is mostly not public, stated that “the storm is just around the corner.” It will only get worse and the only question now is; when will it end and how?
