Tag Archives: Healthcare

A Very Grey Swan Keynes and Knight famously simultaneously in 1921 identified the concept of fundamental uncertainty as a situation not understandable by using a probability distribution, an idea popularized by Nassim Taleb just as the 2008 crash happened as a “black swan.”  Taleb defined white swans as situations describable by Gaussian normal distributions.  For situations not full uncertainty or white swans Taleb coined the idea of “grey swans,”...

There is a severe Remdesivir shortage On March 2 2020, I warned you that this was going to happen. I did not warn about the opaque and arbitrary Trump administration policy, because the Trump administration is always “worse than you imagine possible even taking into account the fact that it is worse than you imagine possible” Brad DeLong 2003 or so referring to the last Republican presidency. When are Americans going to notice the pattern ?...

Comparing the US’s coronavirus response with its Western European peer group Western Europe is a reasonable peer group of countries against which to compare the US response to coronavirus. The 5 largest countries in Western Europe in particular – in order, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain – together have a population of about 324 million, vs. 332 million for the US. So let’s take a look at this peer group of European States vs. the United States...

Potential Pricing for Remdesivir The FDA has approved Remdesivir for emergency use and Gilead Science will denote its current 1.5 million vials, which could potentially treat 300 thousand patients as it takes 5 to 10 treatments per patient. The WHO wants more Remdesivir: The World Health Organization said Monday that it will speak with the U.S. government and Gilead Sciences on how antiviral drug remdesivir could be made more widely available to treat...

It looks like many states are preparing to end stay at home quarantine. If you look at the numerous charts around on the number of new  coronavirus-19 cases reported each day it looks encouraging.  They show a peaking and a very slow decline or at best a  plateau. However, this plateau is the product of two very different curves for New York city and the rest of the country.  It is New York city falling and the rest of the country rising significantly....

A note about the weekly and monthly economic data For the past month or so, with the exception of the weekly catastrophe of new jobless claims it hasn’t been very important to keep track of the economic data. Now that it is May, that will start to change with the weekly data as of next week (reporting on this week). The monthly data fo May, of course, won’t be reported for until June starts. That’s because the month of April was fully involved in the...

Coronavirus dashboard for May 4: new infections, deaths continue slow decline Here is the update through yesterday (May 3). As usual, significant developments are in italics. The bottom line is the same as several days ago: trends in new infections, deaths, and in testing have all turned positive – if not positive enough. But the good news remains primarily a NY story. I have discontinued giving the % increases day/day in infections and deaths. They...

SCOTUS decided 8-1 in favor of health insurance companies and coops in MAINE COMMUNITY HEALTH OPTIONS v. UNITED STATES decision, April 27, 2020 to be paid. I have been following this issue since 2015 and SCOTUS finally ruled on Republican’s (Sessions, Upton, Kingston) blockage of the Risk Corridor Program funding. A bit of history to explain how we got to this point. Letter to the editor at Modern Healthcare Alert (2019): “If you are going to report on...

Here Trisha Greenhalgh, an actual expert, writes what I have been trying to write. In a Twitter thread. Please click the link. Two key tweets But the principle of waiting for the definitive RCT [randomized controlled Trial] before taking action should not be seen as inviolable, or as always defining good science. On the contrary, this principle, inappropriately applied, will distort our perception of what “good science” is. This explains with less than...

On April 20th Georgia Governor Kemp called for “reopening more of the state’s economy to minimize the ‘terrible impact of Covid-19 on public health and the pocketbook.’” It would apply to certain non-essential businesses. Kemp, who was later told by Trump it was too early to reopen Georgia’s economy, was following Trump’s lead to begin to open state economies. Many states like Georgia do not have the funds available (by choice) to pay for long periods of...