Category: Health Care
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Northam’s Ludicrous Beach Rules
by Kerry Dougherty It’s beginning to look like something other than a concern for public health lurks behind Governor Ralph Northam’s irrational decision to keep the beaches closed indefinitely. Although there is much we don’t know about COVID-19, study after study — from Australia to Stanford to Connecticut — indicates that while the virus is…
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Virginia’s Nursing Home Regulations Non-compliant with Federal Regulations and Virginia Law
by James C. Sherlock (Updated 1 PM Sunday, May 10) In 2016 the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) revised the regulations for nursing homes seeking certification under Medicare and Medicaid, which is effectively all nursing homes. The overall title of the changes was Medicare and Medicaid…
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COVID-19 Update: Confirmed Cases Trending Lower
Despite a rough doubling of COVID-19 tests over the past two weeks, the number of confirmed cases is trending lower according to this graph (above) produced on the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) COVID-19 dashboard. Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 patients currently being hospitalized is drifting higher, as the chart below from John Butcher indicates.…
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What? Nursing Home Rights Outweigh Patient Rights?
by James A. Bacon In a press conference yesterday, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and and Human Resources Daniel Carey stated that under current law the right of nursing homes to protect “personal health information” outweighs the right of the public to know which nursing homes have residents or employees infected by the COVID-19 virus and…
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Death Comes to Virginia’s Nursing Homes
by Kerry Dougherty Imagine for a moment that your grandmother is in a Virginia nursing home. You haven’t seen her since late February or early March when visitation was terminated due to concerns about the coronavirus. Perhaps your grandmother has some dementia, making it impossible to chat on the phone to ask how she’s doing.…
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COVID-1 Update: Same Old, Same Old
Not much new to report on the COVID-19 data front, mainly because the Virginia Department of Health, citing “a technical error,” hasn’t updated its dashboard since May 5. That leaves us only the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association dashboard to scour for new trends. The main trend worth noting from the last few days is…
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WTJU Podcast: COVID-19 and the Economy
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in Agriculture & forestry, Bacon and Pigs, Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Charity, Philanthropy, Nonprofits, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Corruption and Scandals, Culture wars, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, Elections, Electoral process, Energy, Entrepreneurs and Innovation, Environment, Federal issues, General Assembly, Governance, Government Finance, Government Transparency, Gun rights, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, Telecommunications, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka Here’s is the twice-monthly podcast produced by WTJU, the official radio station of the University of Virginia. With me on this podcast are Nathan Moore, the station general manager, and Sarah Vogelsong, who covers, labor, energy and environmental issues across the state for the Virginia Mercury, a fairly new and highly regarded…
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How COVID-19 Demographics Can Inform Public Policy
by James A. Bacon The COVID-19 virus, we have been told repeatedly strikes all ages. That statement is true, but also misleading. If one crunches the numbers from the Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard, there is no avoiding the conclusion that COVID-19 is a serious disease primarily for the middle-aged and elderly, and it…
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New Ways to Visualize COVID-19 Data
John Butcher has created two new graphs that allow us to visualize the capacity of Virginia hospitals to handle the COVID-19 epidemic. The graph above compares the number of COVID-19 hospitalized patients to the total number of occupied beds and the total number of hospital beds in Virginia. Clearly, there s abundant excess capacity in…
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Behaving Like a Commonwealth
by Kerry Dougherty Gov. Ralph Northam’s press conferences are weird, unsettling events. They’re free of the fireworks and drama that are a regular feature of the president’s wild pressers. But there’s a sense of quiet despair and dictatorial impulses about them. Northam is frequently befuddled on these occasions, as he was last week when he…
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COVID-19 – Virginia is the Most Under Tested State in the Union
by James C. Sherlock I have told readers that I will update the state testing rankings here regularly. In a spreadsheet that I constructed using testing data from the COVID Tracking Project and Bureau of the Census data for population of 50 states and D.C., Virginia ranks 48th in testing per 100,000 citizens as of…
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Is There Enough Helicopter Money to Save Higher Ed?
by James A. Bacon How much money are Virginia colleges and universities getting in federal COVID-relief helicopter dollars? More than $294 million, according to data published by OpenTheBooks in Forbes. The biggest winners are Virginia’s big public universities — George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Virginia Tech foremost among them — but Liberty University,…
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Good Move… But What Happened to Data-Driven Decision Making?
by James A. Bacon If current trends hold, Governor Ralph Northam said in a press conference yesterday, he will allow significant relaxation of emergency COVID-19 shutdown measures by May 14. Social distancing and telework will be encouraged but not mandated. Phase 1 in the step-by-step migration back to normal will continue to ban social gatherings…
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COVID-19 Update: The Numbers Northam Is Tracking
In the recent past, I have been publishing COVID-19 metrics showing how Virginia hospitals had plenty of spare capacity (beds, ICUs and ventilators) to handle an increase in patients stricken by the virus. Now that Governor Ralph Northam has let his no-elective-procedures edict expire, the issue is moot. Unless we observe an unexpected surge in…
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Screwing Workers On Safety and Liability
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in Bacon and Pigs, Business and Economy, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Corruption and Scandals, Economic development, Environment, Federal issues, General Assembly, Government Finance, Health Care, Money in politics, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka At 4:30 a.m. on April 27, about 100 workers of the Greater Richmond Transit Company — half of the total – failed to show up for work. Worried about the health of its membership, Local 1220 of the International Amalgamated Transit Union demanded additional safety measures such as full personal protection equipment,…