Experts know the size of the problem, they know the rate at which people are being hospitalized or dying, and they can follow its movements. It also establishes how widespread a virus actually is. Testing is important not only because it gets people diagnosed and on an appropriate treatment if they do have an infection. “The coronavirus outbreak is already exposing inefficiencies and inequities in our health system, and it is likely to put much more strain on the system in the coming weeks.”Īnd the slow start to testing in the US is only going to exacerbate those problems. performs worse than average among similarly large and wealthy countries across nearly all measures of preparedness for a pandemic,” Cynthia Cox, director of the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, told me. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday that nearly 80 percent of New York City’s intensive care units were already filled, even with the Covid-19 outbreak still expanding.īy any of these metrics on pandemic preparedness, America trails most of the rest of the developed world. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Imagesīut none of those units are sitting empty right now - they already have non-coronavirus patients who need them and will continue to need them through the crisis. Kaiser Permanente medical workers take swabs from people for the coronavirus at a drive-through testing facility in San Francisco, California on March 12, 2020. Hospitals will need rooms for the people who require close monitoring in a clinical setting, and ICU beds and ventilators for patients who take a turn for the worse and require mechanical support to keep their bodies functioning. People need to go to the doctor and get checked if they have Covid-19 symptoms, yet Americans may avoid medical care, even for serious conditions, because of the costs. “Everyone working in this space would agree that no matter how you measure it, the US is far behind on this,” says Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The rollout of Covid-19 testing has been patchy, reliant on a mix of government and private labs to scale up the capacity to perform the tens of thousands of tests that will be necessary. Before the crisis even began, the United States had fewer doctors and fewer hospital beds per capita than most other developed countries. There is a real concern that Americans, with a high uninsured rate and high out-of-pocket costs compared to the rest of the world, won’t seek care because of the costs. The international response to the novel coronavirus has laid this bare: America was less prepared for a pandemic than countries with universal health systems.
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