I’ve been offline most of the afternoon, so waaay late to this, but I think it’s a good one. Rewind to the beginning to hear Biden’s remarks.
Open thread
Open Thread: Biden Economic Impact of CovidPost + Comments (96)
Archives for 2020
The Ongoing Pandemic: Some (More) Longer Reads
The US reported the second highest day of Covid-19 deaths Tuesday.
There were 2,597 new deaths reported across the US. The only day to top it was April 15, when six more deaths were recorded. https://t.co/UP95QuOZgp
— CNN (@CNN) December 2, 2020
Don’t know who still needs the warning, but: Unpleasant material below the fold…
The Ongoing Pandemic: Some (More) Longer ReadsPost + Comments (144)
Why Are We Doing This? Football Version
More and more professional football players are becoming infected with the ‘rona. Some will carry permanent disabilities; more will never be able to play football again.
So why are we doing this? It’s alluring to believe that if we act normal, things will be normal. But the virus doesn’t care.
Athletes are getting plenty of tests; nurses not so much.
Sally Jenkins, Kurt Streeter, and Jerry Brewer are all asking that question.
Jenkins:
There has been evidence of zombie-like incursion into the NFL’s main office in the Park Avenue headquarters, despite all those hermetic doors that make a hissing noise. The league’s determination to make the Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers play on a Wednesday at 3:40 p.m., after three postponements, is purely unsettling. There is something about it that feels forced, involuntary, creepily so. It’s as though league officials mistake frenzied activity for winning against the virus. But then, they just reflect their audience in that.
Streeter:
Of the league’s 32 teams, all but one, the Seattle Seahawks, have been hit by the virus. The outbreaks began piling up almost from the start, as N.F.L. teams began flying across the country for games, some of them playing in stadiums with a limited number of fans. In October, two dozen Tennessee Titans became infected, causing the first of what has become a string of postponements.
The N.F.L. looks like it is running a circus.
Among the latest lowlights: A marquee game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers, scheduled for Thanksgiving Day, was postponed to Sunday after several Ravens players tested positive, including the league’s reigning most valuable player, Lamar Jackson. As the number of infected players began piling up, the league moved the game to Tuesday.
Then the league rescheduled the game again, this time for Wednesday afternoon.
Brewer:
While it is unlikely that Commissioner Roger Goodell will publicly acknowledge any danger, he needs to make sure the league has several firm contingency plans in place. The coronavirus is in charge, and it is raging once again. So let’s keep saying it: It’s impossible to play football out in the open, without a bubble environment, and not be significantly affected. Some teams have been negligent and sloppy about health protocols, and the NFL has grown less compassionate and more forceful in disciplining them. But the reality is that the league can’t mandate its way out of trouble, not entirely.
Open thread!
[Looking forward to a bigfoot from Cole! Update: No, I did it! Unapologetically!]Why Are We Doing This? Football VersionPost + Comments (106)
It’s All a Big Game When It Isn’t a Grift
I really hate these people:
The TL;DR of the call was this: Senator Johnson knows that Joe Biden won a free and fair election. He is refusing to admit it publicly and stoking conspiracies that undermine our democracy solely because it would be “political suicide” to oppose Trump. I find this unconscionable.
Scooplet: Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) has been telling colleagues and allies that he plans to challenge the Electoral College votes when Congress officially certifies Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, as long as a Senate Republican joins him in the long-shot effort, sources tell your Huddle host.
Brooks confirmed his plans in a phone interview, adding that he is still considering objecting to the vote-counting process even if no one joins him — though he acknowledged that would be more of a symbolic protest. Brooks, echoing President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud without providing evidence, argued that the election was “badly flawed” and that most mail-in voting is “unconstitutional.”
“In my judgment, if only lawful votes by eligible American citizens were cast, Donald Trump won the Electoral College by a significant margin, and Congress’s certification should reflect that,” Brooks said. “This election was stolen by the socialists engaging in extraordinary voter fraud and election theft measures.”
These people are scum.
It’s All a Big Game When It Isn’t a GriftPost + Comments (63)
Choice complexity strikes again
This week, a great team of researchers released a fascinating paper in JAMA Internal Medicine##. They asked a simple question: Do people who are at some point diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) display declining cognition in their financial management before diagnosis.
Results Overall, 54 062 (17 890 [33.1%] men; mean [SD] age, 74 [7.3] years) were never diagnosed with ADRD during the sample period and 27 302 had ADRD for at least 1 quarter of observation (8573 [31.4%] men; mean [SD] age, 79.4 [7.5] years). Single Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with ADRD were more likely to miss payments on credit accounts as early as 6 years prior to diagnosis compared with demographically similar beneficiaries without ADRD (7.7% vs 7.3%; absolute difference, 0.4 percentage points [pp]; 95% CI, 0.07-0.70:) and to develop subprime credit scores 2.5 years prior to diagnosis (8.5% vs 8.1%; absolute difference, 0.38 pp; 95% CI, 0.04-0.72). By the quarter after diagnosis, patients with ADRD remained more likely to miss payments than similar beneficiaries who did not develop ADRD (7.9% vs 6.9%; absolute difference, 1.0 pp; 95% CI, 0.67-1.40) and more likely to have subprime credit scores than those without ADRD (8.2% vs 7.5%; absolute difference, 0.70 pp; 95% CI, 0.34-1.1). Adverse financial events were more common among patients with ADRD in lower-education census tracts. The patterns of adverse events associated with ADRD were unique compared with other medical conditions (eg, glaucoma, hip fracture).
Okay, this is just a wicked cool idea and study.
I’ve been spending a lot of my non-COVID related headspace on the challenges of choice in the ACA marketplaces. Choosing insurance under the best of circumstances is tough. There are a lot of things that need to be estimated and assumed and guessed at. There is a lot of language to decipher. There is a lot of edge cases that occur. Insurance choice is, at best, a challenge.
As we were talking about Medicare Open Enrollment yesterday, WVNG made a great comment (my emphasis)
My wife and I are on traditional Medicare, with no D or supplemental. We are betting that our current good health (he says while knocking furiously on wood) will continue, which is an unknown. As others have noted above, it’s a crazy complex system for anyone to navigate, but for a population where many have declining mental resources it is problematic.
Yeah!
The study above is strong evidence of pragmatic consequences of a chronic illness that will present well before diagnosis. It is a disease that makes executive management, and complex cognitive choices either more difficult or impossible as it progresses. Early signs of the disease show that routine choices/daily life management are more difficult for people who will eventually be diagnosed with ADRD. ADRD is not an unusual diagnosis. In this study, about a third of the cohort has at least one ADRD diagnosis on at least one claim. ADRD is tough to diagnose.
Yet we expect a population that has significant decision-making challenges due to their health conditions to sort through a complex decision menus to choose their hopefully optimal, or at least satisficing health finance and financial protection product every year.
OUCH!
##Nicholas LH, Langa KM, Bynum JPW, Hsu JW. Financial Presentation of Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias. JAMA Intern Med. Published online November 30, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.6432
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Numbers
President-elect Joe Biden and his treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen urged lawmakers to move quickly and pass a coronavirus relief measure to help reactivate an economy ravaged by the global pandemic https://t.co/Ya6WpmyeKB pic.twitter.com/P4MwBihnXA
— Reuters (@Reuters) December 2, 2020
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Tuesday/Wednesday, Dec. 1-2
Health officials are terrified of a pandemic Christmas https://t.co/i4fe1Wc3KA
— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) December 1, 2020
… Health experts point to several key takeaways: Many states were overwhelmed by unexpected surges in testing — with many families hoping a negative result might make their planned gatherings a little safer. Some airports were not prepared for the huge crowds that had not been seen since the beginning of the pandemic, making it difficult for travelers to maintain social distancing.
But perhaps the most obvious lesson: Public health messaging needs to be retooled, as whole swaths of the country are simply tuning out the warnings from officials and experts.
“We have to rethink how we’re communicating. Blaming people, yelling at them, stigmatizing them — clearly it’s not working,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security. “We have to show compassion and empathy. Understand where people are coming from and persuade them to do otherwise.”…
In recent days America’s infection curve has already become a sheer mountain-climber’s cliff with record-breaking case numbers and hospitalizations. If people travel and gather for Christmas as they did this past week, they project, the country’s already catastrophic situation could reach levels where hospitals are forced to choose which patients to save and which to let die, and where lockdowns become unavoidable realities of everyday life.
“What concerns me is that Thanksgiving is an American holiday,” said Melissa Nolan, an epidemiologist at the University of South Carolina. “Christmas is an international holiday — it’s celebrated around the world. So if Thanksgiving is an indicator of how much travel we can expect at Christmas, I think that is very concerning.”…
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Tuesday/Wednesday, Dec. 1-2Post + Comments (27)