The Liberty Loan Parade on September 28th was a major event in the pandemic. Health officials knew that the flu was in Philadelphia and had warned City Officials about it in very clear terms. The parade continued on and 3 days later, people started showing up to hospitals, just as predicted. The morgue was rated for 36 bodies. Hundreds came in every day that winter. They had priests operating backhoes to bury the dead, as the workers were too sick to do so. The entire city was quarantined.
Still, newspapers published day after day that everything was fine, despite the obituaries becoming an ever thickening section. People knew and it wasn't hard to guess.
The Soviets did it with Chernobyl, the Chinese are doing it right now, and the US did it nearly 100 years ago.
These are human things, not specific to any country.
But in the US some guy owes thousands for getting a test that turned out to be negative.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article24047680...
I think the bigger take-away here is that Insurance providers, especially the lower tier ones, will fight you tooth and nail to provide the medical coverage and incur all the costs associated with that (billing personnel, lawyers etc...) instead of just paying for the costs as agreed upon.
This is very distressing, and I was looking at my medical bills from last year, the blood work done cost nearly $800, and I opted for a cortisone level exam that was $280, of which I only paid $15. But it took a ton of legwork, calling for procedure numbers, speaking to clueless CSR outside the US. The costs for basic procedures are just outlandish, so both the hospital as well as the Insurance play this war of attrition where the only real loser is the patient caught in between, often while ill and with no other recourse.
This poor guy got screwed and even with medical insurance they wanted HIM to do the legwork to prove he shouldn't pay when his exams were complete.
I'm kind of on-board for a Megacorp like Walmart to enter this space at this point, if only to see what other alternatives they could come with.
Their vision stuff wasn't bad at all, I had a hard time getting an appointment with a local provider with my medical insurance due to time/schedule constraints, so I went to a Walmart, got an exam during lunch (covered by insurance), gave them my frames and 1.5 week later I had them in my hand with new lenses for $155 with 2 year warranty waiting for me in the evening (7pm?).
I think my Insurance savings would have been like $40 had I gone into a network optometrist so it was hardly a deal breaker as my time was a bigger concern.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/02/wh...
And there are demands now for increasing general surveillance to provide for better CDC responses. It's just disgusting.
This has to stop and the only way it'll stop is with proper government regulations that are enforced. The patient should never see a bill for anything other then a set monthly premium (which ideally should come out of taxes, but it doesn't have to completely). Anything else, at this point, is fucking barbaric, primitive, and shameful. To be the richest country in the world and have the worst healthcare system in the developed world is disgusting.
When it costs $3270 to take a COVID-19 test [1], and if I’m young, and poor, and broke, then well, F that. I’m going to just take my chances and risk it. And try to not cough on some rich guy, because well, he has insurance that’ll probably pay for it.
And then our President tells us that not everyone can get a vaccine, just because it’s too expensive [2], and they can’t afford to pay for it. Tough luck. Meanwhile, he gives another tax cut to his rich billionaire buddies.
[1] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article24047680...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-says-co...
Meanwhile the rest of the world is going to get ravaged.
I think Europe is going to explode in cases by next week.
Then the Middle East in 2 weeks.
Then South America in 3 weeks.
I think it’s already silently spreading in America. Maybe it’ll explode in 2 weeks.
I don't think so.
If we were to extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world (ex. China), that would be around 8.19 million cases and around 350k deaths. But this assumes that the cities of the rest of the world could implement the strict curfews that China implemented.
It's also important to remember that Hubei had a big support network of neighboring cities which could provide resources. Countries where all cities will break out at the same time will have a hard time copping.