Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Bütikofer and Salvanes (2020) in The Review of Economic Studies: This article examines the economic impact of a tuberculosis control program launched in Norway in 1948. In the 1940s, Norway had one of the highest tuberculosis infection rates in Europe, affecting about 85% of the inhabitants. To lower the disease burden, the Norwegian government launched…
STAT News has an excellent article evaluating where we are on the federal initiative to fast track the development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. To date, the fastest a vaccine was ever developed was four years. Operation Warp Speed, or OWS, has already spent about $10 billion to help vaccine makers develop their candidates…
Based on an a medRχiv working paper by Vu by et al. (2020), the answer from an analysis of other emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The authors analyze hypothetical investment returns of a portfolio of 141 pre-clinical emerging infectious disease (EID) vaccine development programs across different emerging infections without a vaccine. These…
COVID-19 is a global pandemic and finding a vaccine for COVID-19 would be a boon to societal. The value would be enormous. One study found that the value would be more than 1.1% of GDP. Since global GDP is $87.7 trillion, the value of a vaccine would be nearly $1 trillion. In a recent colloquium…
That is based on an event study approach from a recent Health Affairs article by Lyu and Wehby (2020). Specifically, Mandating face mask use in public is associated with a decline in the daily COVID-19 growth rate by 0.9, 1.1, 1.4, 1.7, and 2.0 percentage points in 1–5, 6–10, 11–15, 16–20, and 21 or more…
The New York Times reports: California’s two largest public school districts said on Monday that instruction would be online-only in the fall, in the latest sign that school administrators are increasingly unwilling to risk crowding students back into classrooms until the coronavirus is fully under control.The school districts in Los Angeles and San Diego, which…
As COVID-19 cases continue to rise in the US, there was some good news last week from this year’s AIDS conference. Due to COVID-19, the conference had to be held remotely. One policy goal is known as the 90:90:90, which means to identify 90% of HIV cases, treat 90% of those identified and supress viral…
Take a look at these two graphs. The first gives the number of new COVID-19 cases from John Hopkins University. It is a scary graph. The second graph is the number of COVID deaths from IHME. Not nearly as bad. CDC reported death numbers are similar. In fact, the number of deaths in recent weeks…
Azar et al. (2020) use electronic health record data to examine differences in COVID-19 hospitalization rates by patient characteristics. The authors find that: …compared with non-Hispanic white patients, nonHispanic African American patients had 2.7 times the odds of hospitalization, after adjustment for age, sex, comorbidities, and income. These findings echo similar COVID-19-related conclusions across California.…
That is the title of my commentary with co-authors Kathy Lang and Ross Maclean in the Journal of Clinical Pathways. The abstract is below. What is the right price for a new treatment for COVID-19? One common approach—which is frequently used worldwide and in the United States by the Institute of Clinical and Economic Review—measures…