In Los Angeles, more than 35% of households report serious problems with paying credit cards, loans or other bills, while the same percentage report having depleted all or most of their savings.

This article was published on Friday, September 25, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By Jackie Fortiér, KPCC

Working as a fast-food cashier in Los Angeles, Juan Quezada spends a lot of his time these days telling customers how to wear a mask.

“They cover their mouth but not their nose,” he said. “And we’re like, ‘You gotta put your mask on right.'”

Quezada didn’t expect to be enforcing mask-wearing. Six months ago, he was a restaurant manager, making $30 an hour, working full time and saving for retirement. But when Los Angeles County health officials shut down most restaurants in March because of the spreading pandemic, Quezada lost his job. The only work he could find pays a lot less and is part time.

“I only work three hours and four hours rather than eight or 10 or 12 like I used to work,” he said.

Quezada doesn’t know anyone who has gotten COVID-19, but the pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of his life. “I am just draining my savings — draining and draining and draining,” he said. “I have to sell my car. Uber is a luxury.” Mostly, he now bikes or rides the bus to his part-time job.

Quezada is one of hundreds of people who responded in a newly published poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Among other things, the poll, which surveyed people from July 1 to Aug. 3, found that a whopping 71% of Latino households in Los Angeles County have experienced serious financial problems during the pandemic, compared overall with 52% of Black households there and 37% of whites. (Latinos can be of any race or combination of races.)

Like Quezada, many are burning through their savings and are having a hard time paying for necessities such as food. Quezada estimated he has about six months of savings left.

In Los Angeles, more than 35% of households report serious problems with paying credit cards, loans or other bills, while the same percentage report having depleted all or most of their savings. Eleven percent of Angelenos polled said they didn’t have any savings at the start of the outbreak.

Nationally, the picture is similar. In results released last week, the poll found that 72% of Latino households around the country reported they’re facing serious financial problems, double the share of whites who said so. And 46% of Latino households reported they have used up all or most of their savings during the pandemic.

How Poverty Differs for Latinos

Nationally, the poll found that 63% of Latinos reported loss of household income either through reduced hours or wages, furloughs or job loss since the start of the pandemic.

But Latinos have kept working through the crisis, said David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA.

“In Washington, the idea is you’re poor because you don’t work. That’s not the issue with Latinos,” he said. “Latinos work. But they’re poor. The problem is, we don’t pay them.”

Latinos have the highest rate of labor force participation of any group in California. In March, when state and local officials shut down many businesses, Latinos lost jobs like everyone else. But Latinos got back to work faster.

“In April, the Latino [labor force participation] rate bounced right back up and actually has continued to increase slowly, whereas the non-Latino rate is dropping,” Hayes-Bautista said. “The reward that Latinos have for their high work ethic is a high rate of poverty.”

That work ethic has also contributed to a much higher rate of COVID-19. Hayes-Bautista pointed out that in California, as in some other regions in the U.S., Latinos tend to hold many of the jobs that have been deemed essential, and that’s made them highly susceptible to the coronavirus. Latinos now account for 60% of COVID-19 cases in California, even though they’re about 40% of the population.

Not only are they getting infected, but there’s been nearly a fivefold increase in working-age Latinos dying from the coronavirus since May.

“These are workers usually in their prime years — peak earning power and everything else,” Hayes-Bautista said. “Latinos between 50 and 69, those are the ones that are being hit the hardest. That’s pretty worrying.”

Exposed — And Often Without Health Insurance

Nationally, according to the poll, 1 in 4 Latino households report serious problems affording medical care during the pandemic.

Many of the essential jobs that Latinos are more likely to perform — farmworker or nursing home aide or other contract work, for example — lack benefits. That means some Latinos are more exposed to the coronavirus and less likely to have health insurance because they don’t get coverage through an employer.

Others, such as Mariel Alvarez, lack health insurance because of citizenship restrictions. She lives with her parents and sisters in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley. Alvarez lost her sales job and her employer-sponsored health insurance when the pandemic hit in March, she said. Then she got sick.

Eventually, her whole family was ill. Alvarez had to pay out-of-pocket to go to a CVS clinic near her home. But after a couple of $50 visits, it got too expensive.

“I just couldn’t afford to continue to go to the doctor,” she said. She suspected it was COVID-19 but was unable to get tested.

Now that she’s recovered, getting a job with health insurance is crucial because she doesn’t qualify for any state or federal support. Alvarez is undocumented and was brought to the U.S. by her parents as a child from Bolivia. She’s one of roughly 640,000 immigrants who has a permit allowing her to work and defer deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

“I don’t want to jeopardize that,” Alvarez said. “You’re not supposed to use any of the government assistance when you’re on that. You’re only supposed to work, and that’s it.”

The pandemic has created a big need for one job: contact tracers. So Alvarez completed a free certificate online in the hope it will give her an edge. She’s going through the application process; if she gets hired, she hopes to have benefits again.

In the meantime, she’ll do her best not to get sick.

Jackie Fortiér is a health reporter for KPCC and LAist.com.

This story is part of a partnership that includes KPCC, NPR and KHN.

Financial fears reignited this year when Matthew Fentress' cardiologist suggested he undergo an ablation procedure to restore a normal heart rhythm.

This article was published on Friday, September 25, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By Laura Ungar

Matthew Fentress was just 25 when he passed out while stuffing cannolis as a cook for a senior living community six years ago. Doctors diagnosed him with viral cardiomyopathy, heart disease that developed after a bout of the flu.

Three years later, the Kentucky man’s condition had worsened, and doctors placed him in a medically induced coma and inserted a pacemaker and defibrillator. Despite having insurance, he couldn’t pay what he owed the hospital. So Baptist Health Louisville sued him and he wound up declaring bankruptcy in his 20s.

“The curse of being sick in America is a lifetime of debt, which means you live a less-than-opportune life,” said Fentress, who still works for the senior facility, providing an essential service throughout the coronavirus pandemic. “The biggest crime you can commit in America is being sick.”

Financial fears reignited this year when his cardiologist suggested he undergo an ablation procedure to restore a normal heart rhythm. He said hospital officials assured him he wouldn’t be on the hook for more than $7,000, a huge stretch on his $30,000 annual salary. But if the procedure could curb the frequent extra heartbeats that filled him with anxiety, he figured the price was worth it.

He had the outpatient procedure in late January and it went well.

Afterward, “I didn’t have the fear I’m gonna drop dead every minute,” he said. “I felt a lot better.”

Then the bill came.

Patient: Matthew Fentress is a 31-year-old cook at Atria Senior Living who lives in Taylor Mill, Kentucky. Through his job, he has UnitedHealthcare insurance with an out-of-pocket maximum of $7,900 — close to the maximum allowed by law.

Total Bill: Fentress owed a balance of $10,092.13 for cardiology, echocardiography and family medicine visits on various dates in 2019 and 2020. UnitedHealthcare had paid $28,920.52 total, including $27,561.37 for the care he received on the day of his procedure.

Service Provider: Baptist Health Louisville, part of the nonprofit system Baptist Health.

Medical Service: Fentress underwent cardiac ablation this year on Jan. 23. The outpatient procedure involved inserting catheters into an artery in his groin that were threaded into his heart. He also had related cardiology services, testing and visits to a primary care doctor and a cardiologist before and after the procedure.

What Gives: Fentress said he always made sure to take jobs with health insurance, “so I thought I’d be all right.”

But like nearly half of privately insured Americans under age 65, he has a high-deductible health plan, a type of insurance that experts say often leaves patients in the lurch. When he uses health providers within his insurer’s network, his annual deductible is $1,500 plus coinsurance. His out-of-pocket maximum is $7,900, more than a quarter of his annual salary.

Fentress owed around $5,000 after his 2017 hospitalization and set up a monthly payment plan but said he was sent to collections after missing a $150 payment. He declared bankruptcy after the same hospital sued him.

He faced another bill about a year later, when a panic attack sent him to the emergency room, he said. That time, he received financial aid from the hospital.

When he got the bill for his ablation this spring, he figured he wouldn’t qualify for financial aid a second time. So instead of applying, he tried to set up a payment plan. But hospital representatives said he’d have to pay $500 a month, he said, which was far beyond his means and made him fear another spiral into bankruptcy.

This precarious situation makes him “functionally uninsured,” said author Dave Chase, who defines this as having an insurance deductible greater than your savings. “It’s a lot more frequent than a lot of people realize,” said Chase, founder of Health Rosetta, a firm that advises large employers on health costs. “We’re the undisputed leaders in medical bankruptcy. It’s a sad state of affairs.”

Jennifer Schultz, an economics professor and co-director of the Health Care Management program at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, said Fentress faces a difficult financial road ahead. “Once you declare bankruptcy, your credit rating is destroyed,” she said. “It will be hard for a young person to come back from that.”

A recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that just over a quarter of adults 19 to 64 who reported medical bill problems or debt were unable to pay for basic necessities like rent or food sometime in the past two years. Three percent had declared bankruptcy. In the first half of 2020, the survey found, 43% of U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 were inadequately insured. About half of them were underinsured, with deductibles accounting for 5% or more of their household income, or out-of-pocket health costs, excluding premiums, claiming 10% or more of household income over the past year.

In Fentress’ case, the $10,092 he owed the hospital was more than a third of what his insurer paid for his care. The majority of his debt — $8,271.56 — was coinsurance, about 20% of the bill, which he must pay after meeting his deductible. Because the bill covered services spanning two years, he owed more than his annual out-of-pocket maximum. If all his care had been provided during 2019, he would have owed much less and the insurer would have been responsible for more of the bill.

Dr. Kunal Gurav, an Atlanta cardiologist who wrote about medical costs for the American College of Cardiology, said ablation usually costs about $25,000-$30,000, a range also confirmed by other experts.

The insurer’s payment for Fentress’ care that January day — around $27,600 — falls into the typical cost range, Gurav said. Fentress is being asked to pay $9,296, meaning the hospital would get more than $36,000 for the care.

Schultz, a state representative from Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said nonprofit hospitals could potentially waive or reduce costs for needy patients.

“They definitely have a moral responsibility to provide a community benefit,” she said.

Resolution: Charles Colvin, Baptist Health’s vice president for revenue strategy, said hospital officials quoted Fentress an estimated price for the ablation that was within a few dollars of the final amount, although his bill included other services such as tests and office visits on various dates. Colvin said there appeared to be some charges that UnitedHealthcare didn’t process correctly, which could lower his bill slightly.

Maria Gordon Shydlo, communications director for UnitedHealthcare, said Fentress is responsible for 100% of health costs up to his annual, in-network deductible, then pays a percentage of health costs in “coinsurance” until he reaches his out-of-pocket maximum. So he will owe around $7,900 on his bill, she said, and any new in-network care will be fully covered for the rest of the year.

A hospital representative suggested Fentress apply for financial assistance. She followed up by sending him a form, but it went to the wrong address because Fentress was in the process of moving.

In September, he said he was finally going to fill out the form and was optimistic he’d qualify.

The Takeaway: Insurance performs two functions for those lucky enough to have it. First, you get to take advantage of insurers’ negotiated rates. Second, the insurer pays the majority of your medical bills once you’ve met your deductible. It pays nothing before then. High-deductible plans have the lowest premiums, so they are attractive or are the only plans many patients can afford. But understand you will be asked to pay for everything except preventive care until you’ve hit that number. And your deductible may be only part of the picture: “Coinsurance” is the bulk of what Fentress owes.

Out-of-pocket maximums are regulated by federal law. In 2021, the maximum will be $8,550 for single coverage. Try to plan treatment and procedures with an eye on the calendar — people with chronic conditions and this kind of insurance could save a lot of money if they have an expensive surgery in December rather than January.

As always, if you face a big medical bill, ask about payment plans, financial aid and charity care. According to the Baptist Health system’s website, the uninsured and underinsured can get discounts. Those with incomes equivalent to 200%-400% of the federal poverty level — or $25,520-$51,040 for an individual — may be eligible for assistance.

If you don’t qualify for help, negotiate with the hospital anyway. Arm yourself with information about the going rate insurers pay for the care you received by consulting websites like Healthcare Bluebook or Fair Health.

As Fentress tries to move past his latest bill, he’s now worried about something else: racking up new bills if he contracts COVID-19 down the road as an essential worker with existing health problems and the same high-deductible insurance.

“I don’t have hope for a financially stable future,” he said. “It shouldn’t be such a struggle.”

Dan Weissmann, host of “An Arm and a Leg” podcast, reported the radio interview of this story. Joe Neel of NPR produced Sacha Pfeiffer’s interview with KHN Editor-in-Chief Elisabeth Rosenthal on “All Things Considered.”

Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KHN and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!

Shielding the identities of clinicians and statisticians on the board is meant to insulate them from pressure by the company sponsoring the trial, government officials or the public.

This article was published on Thursday, September 24, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By Rachana Pradhan

Most Americans have never heard of Dr. Richard Whitley, an expert in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Yet as the coronavirus pandemic drags on and the public eagerly awaits a vaccine, he may well be among the most powerful people in the country.

Whitley leads a small, secret panel of experts tasked with reviewing crucial data on the safety and effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines that U.S. taxpayers have helped fund, including products from Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and others. The data and safety monitoring board — known as a DSMB — is supposed to make sure the medicine is safe and it works. It has the power to halt a clinical trial or fast-track it.

Shielding the identities of clinicians and statisticians on the board is meant to insulate them from pressure by the company sponsoring the trial, government officials or the public, according to multiple clinical trial experts who have served on such panels. That could be especially important in the pressure-cooker environment of COVID vaccine research, fueled by President Donald Trump's promises to deliver a vaccine before Election Day.

As pharmaceutical companies work to produce one as quickly as possible, the board's anonymity has stirred concerns that the cloak of secrecy could, paradoxically, allow undue influence. Whitley, for example, represents the specialized world these experts inhabit — a professor revered in academia who also is paid by the drug industry.

Any political pressure to rush pharmaceutical companies or lean on federal regulators to prematurely greenlight a vaccine would undermine a system put in place to ensure public safety. Calls are growing for companies and the government to be more open about who's involved in reviewing the vaccine trials and whether board members have any conflicts of interest.

"We want to know they're truly independent," said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a specialist in clinical trials. "The lack of transparency is exasperating."

Data and safety monitoring boards have existed for decades to vet new drugs and vaccines, acting as a backstop to help ensure unsafe products don't make their way to the public. Typically, there's one board for each product. This time, a joint DSMB with 10 to 15 experts will review unblinded data across trials for multiple coronavirus vaccines whose development the U.S. government has helped fund, according to five people involved in the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed or other coronavirus vaccine work. It is run through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health and consists of outside scientists and statistical experts, not federal employees, NIH Director Francis Collins said on a call with reporters.

"Until they are convinced that there's something there that looks promising, nothing is unblinded and sent to the FDA," Collins said. "I doubt if there have been very many vaccine trials ever that have been subjected to this size and the rigor with which it's being evaluated."

The NIH safety board oversees trials in the U.S. from Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, U.S. officials and others involved in Operation Warp Speed said, but not Pfizer, which is fully funding its clinical trial work and established its own five-member safety panel. Pfizer has attested that it can conclusively determine by late October the effectiveness of its vaccine, being jointly developed with German company BioNTech. It secured a $1.95 billion purchase agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services for the first 100 million doses produced. The agreement gives HHS the option to buy an additional 500 million doses.

Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, which have either started or are aiming to soon begin large-scale trials in the U.S. involving thousands of patients, collectively have received more than $2 billion in government funds for vaccine development; billions more have been meted out under agreements similar to the HHS contract with Pfizer to buy millions of vaccine doses. Having one safety board oversee multiple trials could allow researchers to better understand the field of products and apply consistency across evaluations, clinical trial experts said in interviews.

One big advantage "could be more standardization," said Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center at Emory University and a former senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "They can look at that data and look at all the trials instead of just doing one trial."

But it also means that one board has an outsize influence to dictate which coronavirus vaccines eventually succeed or come to a halt, all while most of their identities remain secret. The NIH declined to name them, saying they were "confidential" and could be identified only once a study was complete.

One exception to the mystery is Whitley, who was appointed as chair by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease official. Fauci said that following a "combination of input from us and from him and other colleagues, the people who had the greatest expertise in a variety of areas, including statistics, clinical trials, vaccinology, immunology, clinical work," were selected for the panel.

Whitley's role became public when his university announced it, an unusual move. He is a professor as well as a board member of Gilead Sciences, which recently signed a contract with Pfizer to manufacture remdesivir to treat COVID-19 patients. Whitley, who's been on Gilead's board since 2008, conducted research that led to remdesivir's development.

In 2019, he was paid roughly $430,000 as a Gilead board member, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That same year, he received more than $7,700 in payments from GlaxoSmithKline for consulting, food and travel, according to a federal database that tracks drug and device company payments to physicians.

GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi are jointly developing a vaccine that's received $2 billion from the U.S. government under Operation Warp Speed; however, Whitley, through a university spokesperson, said his DSMB has not seen any GlaxoSmithKline COVID protocols. The companies have yet to begin phase 3 trials. Although he chairs a separate GSK data and safety monitoring board for a pediatric vaccine, he was vetted and cleared by the NIH conflict-of-interest committee with its knowledge of his involvement, the spokesperson said.

"When handled responsibly, it is appropriate for physicians to collaborate with external entities," said UAB spokesperson Beena Thannickal, saying the university works with physicians to ensure that industry engagement is appropriate. "It facilitates a critical exchange of knowledge and accelerates and advances clinical treatments and cures, and it fuels discovery."

Multiple experts praised his skill — Dr. Walter Straus, an associate vice president at the drug company Merck & Co., said Whitley is an "éminence grise" in pediatrics whom people trust.

"I actually trust that process, and the fact that they asked Rich to do it makes me feel reassured because he's so good," said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the University of Alabama-Birmingham's division of infectious diseases.

Multiple scientists who have participated in data and safety monitoring boards maintain it's important to keep the board anonymous to shield them against pressure or even for their safety. For example, when trials were conducted in San Francisco for HIV/AIDS research, the board was confidential to protect members from patients desperate for treatment, said Susan Ellenberg, a professor of biostatistics, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who's written extensively on the history of DSMBs.

If approached by a patient, it "would be very hard to tell you, 'Oh I can't help you.' It's an unreasonable burden," said Ellenberg, who said she was involved in coronavirus-related safety boards but would not name them.

As part of a large-scale clinical trial, the DSMB and a statistician or team that prepares data for those individuals are generally the only ones who see unblinded data about the trial, making it clear who is getting what treatment. A firewall is set up between them and executives from the sponsoring company with financial interests in the trial. The companies sponsoring COVID vaccine trials are not part of any closed sessions during which unblinded data is reviewed. Those are limited to members of the DSMB, the NIAID executive secretary and the independent unblinded statistician who is presenting the data, a NIAID spokesperson said.

DSMB members or their family members should have no professional, proprietary or financial relationship with the sponsoring companies, and the NIAID DSMB executive secretary vetted all members for potential conflicts of interest, NIAID said in response to questions from KHN. Members are paid $200 per meeting.

"It's generally done out of a sense of public service," said Dr. Larry Corey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who is working with NIH officials to oversee the U.S. coronavirus vaccine clinical trials. "You're doing it because of your sense of altruism and obligation to knowing the important role it plays in clinical research and the important role it plays in preserving the scientific integrity of important trials."

Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer have each released protocols that include details on when their DSMBs would review unblinded information about trial participants, and at what points they could recommend pausing or stopping trials. The vaccine data and safety board organized by NIAID advises a broader oversight group consisting of the drug companies sponsoring the trial and representatives from NIAID and HHS' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority that reviews the DSMB recommendations. Ultimately, the drug company has final authority over whether to submit its data to the Food and Drug Administration.

Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are each aiming for their vaccines to have 60% efficacy, which means there would need to be 60% fewer COVID cases among vaccinated individuals in their trials. AstraZeneca's target is 50%. The FDA has said any coronavirus vaccine must be at least 50% effective to secure approval from regulators. While the parameters of their clinical trials have similarities, there are some differences, including when and how many times the DSMB can conduct interim reviews to assess whether each vaccine works.

Pfizer is similarly aiming for its vaccine to be 60% effective. The company allows for four interim reviews of the data starting at 32 cases — a schedule that has been criticized by some researchers who contend it makes it easier for the company to stop the trial prematurely.

Pfizer declined to name the individuals on its monitoring committee, saying only that the group consisted of four people "with extensive experience in pediatric and adult infectious diseases and vaccine safety" and one statistician with a background in vaccine clinical trials. An unblinded team supporting its data-monitoring committee — which includes a medical monitor and statistician — will review severe cases of COVID-19 as they are received and any adverse events associated with the trial at least weekly.

"There is an irresolvable tension between speed and safety," said Dr. Gregory Poland, the head of Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group. "Efficacy is pretty easy to figure out. It's safety that's the issue."

California Healthline editor Arthur Allen contributed to this report.

Rachana Pradhan: rpradhan@kff.org, @rachanadixit

At issue is the degree to which the virus is airborne ― capable of spreading through tiny aerosol particles lingering in the air ― or primarily transmitted through large, faster-falling droplets.

This article was published on Wednesday, September 23, 2020 in Kaiser Health News.

By Robert Lewis and Christina Jewett

Front-line healthcare workers are locked in a heated dispute with many infection control specialists and hospital administrators over how the novel coronavirus is spread ― and therefore, what level of protective gear is appropriate.

At issue is the degree to which the virus is airborne ― capable of spreading through tiny aerosol particles lingering in the air ― or primarily transmitted through large, faster-falling droplets from, say, a sneeze or cough. This wonky, seemingly semantic debate has a real-world impact on what sort of protective measures healthcare companies need to take to protect their patients and workers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention injected confusion into the debate Friday with guidance putting new emphasis on airborne transmission and saying the tiny aerosol particles, as well as larger droplets, are the "main way the virus spreads." By Monday that language was gone from its website, and the agency explained that it had posted a "draft version of proposed changes" in error and that experts were still working on updating "recommendations regarding airborne transmission."

KHN and The Guardian are tracking healthcare workers who died from COVID-19 and writing about their lives and what happened in their final days.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, addressed the debate head-on in a Sept. 10 webcast for the Harvard Medical School, pointing to scientists specializing in aerosols who argued the CDC had "really gotten it wrong over many, many years."

"Bottom line is, there's much more aerosol [transmission] than we thought," Fauci said.

The topic has been deeply divisive within hospitals, largely because the question of whether an illness spreads by droplets or aerosols drives two different sets of protective practices, touching on everything from airflow within hospital wards to patient isolation to choices of protective gear. Enhanced protections would be expensive and disruptive to a number of industries, but particularly to hospitals, which have fought to keep lower-level "droplet" protections in place.

The hospital administrators and epidemiologists who argue that the virus is mostly droplet-spread cite studies that show it spreads to a small number of people, like a cold or flu. Therefore, N95 respirators and strict patient isolation practices aren't necessary for routine care of COVID-19 patients, those officials say.

On the other side are many occupational safety experts, aerosol scientists, front-line healthcare workers and their unions, who are quick to note that the novel coronavirus is far deadlier than the flu ― and argue that the science suggests that high-quality, and costlier, N95 respirators should be required for routine COVID-19 patient care.

The highly protective respirators have been in short supply nationwide and have soared in price, from about $1 to $7 each. Meanwhile, research has shown high rates of asymptomatic virus transmission, putting N95s in high demand among front-line healthcare workers in virtually every setting.

The debate has come to a head at hospitals from coast to coast, as studies have emerged showing that live virus hangs in COVID-19 patients' hospital rooms even in the absence of "aerosol-generating" procedures (such as intubations or breathing treatments) and has contributed to outbreaks at a nursing home, shuttle bus and choir practice.

KHN and The Guardian U.S. are examining more than 1,200 healthcare worker deaths from COVID-19, including many in which their family or colleagues reported they worked with inadequate personal protective gear.

Yet some front-line workers and managers disagree about exactly how and why healthcare workers are getting sick.

The hospital infection-control and epidemiology leaders cite studies suggesting that many healthcare workers are contracting the virus outside of work and at rates that mirror what's happening in their communities.

A group of Penn Medicine epidemiologists in late July characterized research on aerosol transmission as unconvincing and cited "extensive published evidence from across the globe" showing the "overwhelming majority" of coronavirus spread is "via large respiratory droplets."

Unions, occupational health researchers and aerosol scientists, though, reference another pile of studies showing healthcare workers have been hit far harder than average people ― and a study that showed active viral particles can drift in the air up to 15 feet from a patient in a hospital room. Such particles can hang in the air for up to three hours.

Backing their concerns, a July 6 letter signed by 239 scientists urged the medical community and World Health Organization to recognize "the potential for airborne spread of Covid-19."

The letter pointed to studies that say talking, exhaling and coughing emit tiny particles that remain suspended in the air far longer than droplets and "pose a risk of exposure."

In one ward of a Dutch nursing home with recirculated air, researchers found that 81% of the residents were diagnosed with COVID-19. Half of the workers on the ward ― who all wore surgical masks during patient care but not during breaks ― also tested positive for the virus.

Although researchers couldn't exclude transmission by another method, the "near-simultaneous detection" of the virus among nearly all the residents pointed to aerosol spread.

The idea that the virus is spread by either droplets or aerosols is an oversimplification, said Dr. Shruti Gohil, associate medical director of epidemiology and infection prevention at the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine.

Gohil said it's more of a spectrum, with the virus being transmitted by some droplets and some large aerosol particles as well.

One metric people in the hospital infection-control field focus on, though, is how many people one sick person infects. For COVID-19, research has shown that the number is about two ― similar to a cold or the flu. For an unequivocally airborne disease like measles, the number is closer to 12 to 18.

Measles is "what airborne [transmission] looks like," Gohil said. "If this was truly a primary aerosol-transmissible disease, we'd be in a world of hurt."

Hospital epidemiologists are also focused on the rate of household spread of the novel coronavirus. With the measles, the risk of an unvaccinated member of a household getting sick is 85%, said Dr. Rachael Lee, a hospital epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. For COVID-19, she said, the risk is closer to 10%.

Though the virus is believed to be spread more by droplets than aerosol particles, Lee said, staffers at UAB University Hospital wear an N95 respirator for an extra layer of protection and because the patients require so many breathing treatments or procedures considered "aerosol-generating."

Such practices are not universal. At the University of Iowa's hospital, healthcare workers use N95s and face shields for aerosol-generating procedures but otherwise use surgical masks and face shields for routine care of COVID patients, said Dr. Daniel Diekema, director of the division of infectious diseases at the university.

He said such "enhanced droplet precautions" are working. Places where workers are correctly using regular medical masks and face shields are finding no significant spread of the disease among staffers, although one such report focused on the spread from a single patient.

Elsewhere, patients have also been safe on floors where COVID-19 patients and those without the virus have been placed in adjacent rooms ― a practice those concerned about aerosol spread do not endorse.

"It's not an airborne disease the way measles or tuberculosis is," said Dr. Shira Doron, an epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and an assistant professor at Tufts medical school. "We know because we don't see outbreaks that affect multiple patients on a floor."

Origin of the Debate

The CDC helped set the stage for the current debate. In March, the agency issued revised guidance essentially saying it was "acceptable" for healthcare workers to use surgical masks ― instead of N95s ― for routine care. The guidance said respiratory droplets were the most likely source of transmission and recommended N95s only for aerosol-generating procedures.

"The contribution of small respirable particles, sometimes called aerosols or droplet nuclei, to close proximity transmission is currently uncertain. However, airborne transmission from person-to-person over long distances is unlikely," according to the guidance.

The California Hospital Association sent a letter to the state's congressional delegation urging the revised guidance be made permanent.

"We need the CDC to clearly, not conditionally, move from airborne to droplet precautions for patients and healthcare workers," the letter said. Doing so would enable hospitals to preserve PPE supplies and limit the use of special isolation rooms for COVID patients.

An association spokesperson told KHN that the group wasn't weighing in on the science, merely pressing for clarity of the rules.

Christopher Friese, professor of nursing, health management and policy at the University of Michigan, is among the experts who think those rules have endangered healthcare workers.

"We lost a tremendous amount of time and, candidly, lives because the early guidance was to wear N95s only for those specific procedures," Friese said.

Family members and union leaders from Missouri to Michigan to California have raised concerns about nurses dying of COVID-19 after caring for virus patients without N95 respirators. In such cases, hospitals have said they followed CDC guidance.

Friese echoed some occupational safety experts who suggested stronger guidance from the CDC early on calling the disease airborne might have had an impact ― perhaps pressuring President Donald Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act to boost supplies of N95s so "we might have the supply we need everywhere we need," Friese said.

Surveys across the country show there's still a shortage of personal protective equipment at many healthcare facilities.

The CDC guidance posted Friday would have put pressure on some hospitals to bolster their protective measures, something they have reportedly resisted. It said the virus can spread when a person sings, talks or breathes.

"These particles can be inhaled into the nose, mouth, airways, and lungs and cause infection," the site said. "This is thought to be the main way the virus spreads."

By Monday morning, the website was back to saying the virus mainly spreads through droplets, noting that draft language had been posted in error.

The University of Nebraska Medical Center has been taking so-called airborne precautions from the start. There, Dr. James Lawler, a physician and director of the Global Center for Health Security at the university, said his colleagues documented that the virus can drift in the air and live on surfaces at an extensive distance from patients.

He said the hospital tests all admitted patients for the virus and keeps COVID-19 patients apart from the general population. He said they pay close attention to cleaning shared spaces and monitoring airflow within the restricted-access unit. Workers also had N95 respirators or PAPRS, which are fitted hoods with filtered air pumped in.

All of it has added up to a "very low" rate of healthcare worker infections.

Amid uncertainty about the virus, and as an unprecedented number of healthcare workers are dying, adopting the "highest possible" forms of protection seems the best course, said Betsy Marville, nurse organizer for the 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East union in Florida.

That would mean a departure from CDC guidelines that now say healthcare workers need an N95 respirator only for "aerosol-generating" procedures, like intubations or other breathing treatments. She said the rule has left the nurses she represents in Florida scrambling for protective gear ― or unprotected ― when patients need such treatments urgently.

"You don't leave your patient in distress and go looking for a mask," she said. "That's crazy."

Christina Jewett: ChristinaJ@kff.org, @by_cjewett