If you're a person who suffers from regular anxiety, the last few weeks have been especially tough. Schools are closed indefinitely, hand-washing may become the public-health message of the decade (and it's only 2020), and grocery stores look ransacked -- I say looked, because I haven't left my house since Wednesday. That's when the fever started.
At least two large, local medical centers are now providing drive-through testing for COVID-19. Stanford Health Care’s Express Care clinics and Kaiser Permanente are offering the tests to patients through appointments, the medical facilities have announced. The drive-through testing is limited to patients with symptoms who have a doctor’s referral.
The White House and House Democrats reached agreement Friday on a coronavirus relief package to spend tens of billions of dollars on sick leave, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other measures to address the unfolding crisis. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced the agreement in a letter to fellow House Democrats.
William Olson, the chief of operations for eight Oregon hospitals, grew worried when he was shown a heat map of coronavirus cases and flulike symptoms among patients across seven Western states. The maps captured trends for patients of Providence, which owns 51 hospitals and shared the results early Monday with its hospital executives.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) did the math. Like a host of “The Price Is Right,” Porter asked a Department of Health and Human Services official to guess what it would cost for an uninsured American to receive a coronavirus test, itemizing everything from the initial flu test to the expensive emergency room visit. She tallied up the total cost on a whiteboard: an estimated $1,331 out of pocket.
A top healthcare official in the Trump administration refused to say whether the country has enough ventilators to keep people alive during the coronavirus outbreak during an interview Thursday. Fox News’s Martha MacCallum pressed Seema Verma, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to say whether the country had enough ventilators and intensive care units to treat the thousands of patients that could need hospitalization because of the COVID-19 virus. Verma dodged the question three times.