NEWS AND OPINION
When evaluating whether to maintain, loosen, or perhaps tighten restrictions on activity, officials must consider economic consequences along with health effects. Any reopening plan involves tradeoffs, balancing the increased health risk of resuming economic activity against the economic costs of lost jobs, incomes, and the hardship associated with continued economic restrictions.
Millions of people have found a simultaneously grim yet welcome surprise in their mailboxes of late: rebate checks from their car insurance companies which find themselves paying out far fewer claims as a result of COVID-19 “stay at home” orders. While modest, these premium givebacks are, of course, welcome at a time of economic uncertainty.
Unfortunately, people have no such luck with their health insurance premiums. Despite paying these in full, access to healthcare is restricted. Elective surgical procedures and in-person doctor visits are mostly canceled except in emergencies. Insurance companies are certainly having to pay for coronavirus-related claims, but it’s hard to imagine them paying for much else right now outside of babies and heart attacks. That isn’t the fault of Big Insurance, but it’s certainly to their benefit.
We can add this windfall to several others the health insurance industry has enjoyed in recent years. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Big Insurance was owed $12 billion under Obamacare. Insurance company lobbyists at the state level have successfully blocked Trump administration attempts to give people lower-cost alternatives to high-premium Obamacare plans. We all remember the famous “thumbs down” from the late Sen. John McCain, which effectively ended the Obamacare repeal movement.
It’s pretty safe to say that the last thing Big Insurance needs right now is more help from Congress. Yet, that’s exactly what even some congressional Republicans want to do.
There is a race on among at least 83 vaccine manufactures as to who will get to the market first and who will have the most efficacious vaccine. We at Transalgae have a unique platform to tackle this problem. Our plan is to put a piece of the spike viral protein pictured above inside our favorite algal species, grow the algae out to commercial quantities and then give an algae pill with the vaccine inside.
In effect, we are using a genetically modified algae to both manufacture the spike protein and provide a natural encapsulation. The reason one receives an insulin shot or a COVID-19 vaccine in the form of an injection, is that it is difficult to protect the protein of interest from our stomach acids. In addition to protecting the protein, the algae also make the vaccine.
We’re living in Orwellian times, certainly. Consider just this: “Drone” cameras to spy on and punish us expressly while we’re in our own backyards or the middle of nowhere – and hence in places least likely to spread the coronavirus. And then there are the “Freedom Is Slavery” type slogans that seek to convince us of what is exactly opposite the truth. None of which is more obnoxious and dangerous than “We’re all in this together.”
Viruses may not discriminate, but we do. COVID-19 cases and deaths are determined by geography and climate, quality of health care, lifestyle, and overwhelmingly by age and comorbid conditions. The old and infirm are at highest risk, while the young even with other conditions are at both at extremely low risk of suffering and transmitting the disease.
That means, on the one hand, we fail those at greatest peril, as we did by falsely democratizing AIDS with such slogans as “Now Everyone Is at Risk” AIDS. Indeed, a New York Times database shows a third of those classified as dying with COVID-19 are residents or workers in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
Many tourism jobs depend not only on domestic travel, but on international visitors who spend disproportionally greater amounts on lodging, shopping, food, and experiences. Picture Barstow, California, a town where working and middle class jobs are reliant on the shopping outlets and restaurants frequented by countless European and Asian tourists stopping on their journey between Las Vegas and LA.
To save jobs and towns like these, the private sector is already doing its part.
Many airlines have taken advantage of empty airplanes to space out passengers and planes are now thoroughly disinfected. Modern aircraft use cabin air filters similar to those used in hospitals. Airlines will further enhance air quality by requiring the use of facemasks until the crisis abates. The CEO of Southwest Airlines said last Wednesday that he is urging the TSA to conduct temperature scans. Frontier Airlines isn’t waiting for the government, announcing its own plan to check passengers’ temperatures, a practice Air Canada already started this week.
Musk over the weekend threatened to leave California for Texas or Nevada over his factory’s closure. His move has highlighted the competition for jobs and ignited a rush to woo the billionaire executive by states that have reopened their economies more quickly in response to encouragement from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Many countries (and members of their press media) have marvelled at Sweden's relaxed strategy in the face of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: schools and most workplaces have remained open, and police officers were not checking one's errands in the street. Severe critics have described it as Sweden sacrificing its (elderly) citizens to quickly reach herd immunity.1 The death toll has surpassed our three closest neighbours, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, but the mortality remains lower than in the UK, Spain, and Belgium.2
It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes—a population the lockdown was designed to protect.3 Neither does it decrease mortality from COVID-19, which is evident when comparing the UK's experience with that of other European countries.
PCR testing and some straightforward assumptions indicate that, as of April 29, 2020, more than half a million people in Stockholm county, Sweden, which is about 20–25% of the population, have been infected (Hansson D, Swedish Public Health Agency, personal communication). 98–99% of these people are probably unaware or uncertain of having had the infection; they either had symptoms that were severe, but not severe enough for them to go to a hospital and get tested, or no symptoms at all. Serology testing is now supporting these assumptions.4
On Tuesday, biopharmaceutical company Moderna announced that the Food and Drug Administration is fast tracking its experimental preventative COVID-19 vaccine through the regulatory process.
My summary of all this is that, first, we don’t have definitive evidence to know exactly what the effect of mask wearing is in every setting. But we can make some reasonable extrapolations from the data we have. First, for hospital workers, they really should be using the N95 masks, and surgical masks if the former are not available. For the public the cloth masks may be of some benefit, both in spreading and receiving the virus. However, the benefit is likely to be modest. It should not be considered full protection, but just a way to reduce the chance of spread a little bit.
