As President Biden calls for more support to help schools hold in-person classes, public health experts say schools can be relatively safe if they take well-known steps to prevent covid. But a KHN investigation shows many districts and states have ignored health advice or written their own questionable safety rules for schools.
Corporations like Starbucks, Honeywell, Microsoft, Costco and Google are lining up to help with vaccine logistics. But the problem of the moment is supply, not systems.
Hospitals dealing with staff shortages during the current covid surge are unable to tap into one valuable resource: foreign-trained doctors, nurses and other health workers, many with experience treating infectious diseases. Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Nevada are the only states to have eased credentialing requirements during the pandemic.
The ability of California health officials to multitask in a pandemic will be severely tested as they scramble to find staff for vaccination sites while maintaining testing and contact tracing.
Nearly 6 in 10 people 65 and older say they don’t have enough information about how to get vaccinated, according to a new KFF poll.
President Joe Biden is wasting no time getting to work. On his first day in office, Biden signed a series of executive orders addressing the covid pandemic, promising more to come. But even with Democrats taking the barest majority in the Senate, the new president’s ambitious proposals on covid and other health issues could be in for a rough ride. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Tami Luhby of CNN and Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet 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.
On health care, President Joe Biden made it clear that combating the covid-19 pandemic will be his top priority. “We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation,” he said. “We will get through this together.”
Months after President Donald Trump credited monoclonal antibody therapy for his quick recovery from covid-19, only a trickle of the product has found its way into regular people. While hundreds of thousands of vials sit unused, sick patients who might benefit from early treatment have been left on their own to vie for access.
But keeping campaign promises regarding the nation’s covid response will go beyond stepping up the rollout of the vaccines.
Black Americans are receiving covid vaccines at a much lower rate than their white peers due to a combination of mistrust and access issues, leaving them behind in the mission to vaccinate the nation’s population.
