Covid-19 cases are spreading so fast that they’re outpacing the contact-tracing capacities of some local health departments. Faced with mounting caseloads, those departments are asking people who test positive for the coronavirus to do their own contact tracing.
Democratic victories in two runoff elections in Georgia will give Democrats control of the Senate starting Jan. 20, which means they will be in charge of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since 2010. Meanwhile, covid continues to run rampant while vaccine distribution lags. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News and Mary Ellen McIntire of CQ Roll Call join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
The oxygen delivery infrastructure is crumbling under pressure in Los Angeles and other covid hot spots, jeopardizing patients’ access to precious air and limiting hospital turnover.
Covid-19, distrust of police and cheap narcotics have turned parts of the wealthy city into cesspools of filth and drug overdose. City officials and residents profoundly disagree on what needs to be done.
As the pandemic hits Latino communities especially hard, Illinois is expanding public health insurance to all low-income noncitizen seniors. Advocates hope other states follow its lead.
The disruption to daily life caused by the pandemic has increased the number of children seeking mental health care, further straining a system that already struggled to meet the need.
Covid-19 has taken an outsize toll on Black and Hispanic Americans — and those disparities extend to medical workers.
How two effective vaccines on the market make it so much harder to quickly test any competing vaccines.
A growing body of research shows that overuse and misuse of antibiotics in children’s hospitals is helping fuel superbugs, which typically strike frail seniors but are increasingly infecting kids. And the pandemic is making things worse.
As long as humans encroach on nature, pandemics are inevitable — making it important to concentrate resources in areas where people and wildlife are linked.
