OF THE MOMENT
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in late April issued guidelines for the re-implementation of non-COVID-19 care and elective surgeries. Conspicuously absent are any recommendations to test for the coronavirus in either asymptomatic patients or in healthcare personnel.
Instead, the agency recommend using screening metrics such as body temperature and self-reported symptoms to identify people infected with COVID-19, a suggestion that ignores the high risk of virus spread by infected but asymptomatic people and the risk of performing surgical procedures on people who may
A collection of voices, tweets and posts from the week.
TWEETS OF THE WEEK
Meghan McCain
@MeghanMcCain
Quarantine forever. We were told it’s about flattening the curve, now the goal post is moved and it’s about eradicating it forever. There will not be enough printing presses in the country to print the money needed to bail this country out financially!
Liz Cheney
@Liz_Cheney
Dr. Fauci is one of the finest public servants we have ever had. He is not a partisan. His only interest is saving lives. We need his expertise and his judgment to defeat this virus. All Americans should be thanking him. Every day.
Kyrsten Sinema
@SenatorSinema
We need to follow White House and CDC guidelines for re-opening safely. Smart decisions now will help prevent a spike in cases and a second costly and hurtful shutdown.
Dana Kennedy
@kennedydana
In AZ you can go to the gym and pools but not visit loved ones in LTC
(long-term care) facilities. 9 weeks and counting will FINALLy start testing in LTC but only in Skilled nursing facilities. The workers and residents lives matter too. Follow the $.
THEY SAID IT
“Trump has 80 million Twitter followers; Biden has 5 million. … Biden will probably always be an analog candidate in a digital world. But considering how exhausted many Americans are with a president who governs by tweet, an analog candidate may be exactly what the electorate is looking for.”
Politico
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“We have a national media ... just clogged with people who ... who only want to tell one story: “Democrats are the good guys, Republicans are the bad guys.” ... The world is way more complicated than that.”
National Review
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❚ soon get sick with the virus.
It also ignores the risk of asymptomatic transmission of the novel coronavirus to health-care professionals at time when preserving the health-care workforce is critical.
Viral testing in the United States has varied widely between states, suffers from shortages in reagents needed to perform the test, and primarily has focused on diagnosis — not on mitigation.
In order for hospitals to resume routine non-urgent care this paradigm will need to transition to include COVID-19 testing of all hospi