Archive for September, 2020

COVID-19 Analysis from Jennifer Christian, M.D., M.P.H.

Monday, September 21st, 2020

I have written before of my great admiration for Dr. Jennifer Christian and for her Work Fitness and Disability Roundtable (WFDRoundtable@groups.io). The Roundtable is a mainstay for clinicians and other health care professionals.

I thought this morning’s Roundtable post by Jennifer to be particularly thoughtful and thought-provoking, so I asked her if she would allow us to republish the post in its entirety here at the Insider. She very kindly gave permission.

I think Jennifer is one of those brilliant three or four folks I’m lucky enough to know who think around corners. Her mind makes intuitive leaps where others (like mine) plod along.

Here is Jennifer’s post:

How many people have some pre-existing immunity to COVID-19

There is growing uncertainty about what this fall and winter is going to look like with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Are we going to have a second, and possibly even bigger wave of worldwide infections — or is the biggest part of this pandemic over and done with once each geographic area has had its first wave?

A new review from the British Medical Journal says researchers may have been paying too much attention to antibodies and too little attention to a second part of the human immune system that protects against and reacts to infections:  T cells.   More on this in a moment…..

But first, a reminder.  We are in the middle of the first large-scale pandemic with a new and highly contagious respiratory pathogen since the field of immunology was born!   Immunology is still quite young compared to other specialty areas in biological science and medicine.  It was only in the mid-20th century that advances in cell biology started making it possible to study the detailed processes that make up the immune response in detail.  That has led to much deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which vaccines work, to the development of the first cancer chemotherapy agents that selectively killed rapidly-proliferating immune cells, and to the development of immune-modulating drugs, which enable the transplantation of organs by muting the body’s natural rejection of foreign tissues.

The appearance of HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s again precipitated huge leaps in funding for research to increase our understanding of the immune system, which in turn highlighted the function of T cells and other previously unrecognized aspects of it.   However, in comparison to other bodily systems and organs, our knowledge of the human immune system is still primitive — it’s obvious there is much left to learn — and some of what we don’t know may seem very basic!

If you’re an immunologist, virologist, epidemiologist — or a public health officer trying to figure out how to protect and guide your local population — this is the overwhelming challenge of a lifetime.  Personally, I hope that the media and the general public will remember that this pandemic has attacked our society at the very edge of what is known.  All of those professionals are working at a feverish pace to observe carefully, assemble enough data to be confident they have enough to detect a real pattern if it’s actually there, make sense of what they are seeing, and then figure out the implications for action.  Let’s agree to be forgiving of the fact that “the facts” have not all been revealed to us yet, and “the scientists” simply don’t yet know everything we wish they did.

Back to the T cell story.   Researchers have shown that people with the most severe cases of COVID-19 (the ones in ICU and who are most likely to die) often have low T cell levels.  But some other puzzling data has appeared. For example:

  • some countries — and especially some areas within those countries that had bad initial outbreaks — have not seen widespread new infections despite having relaxed protective restrictions; and,
  • blood tests in a noticeable fraction of people with no record of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 virus show some of the T cells reacting weakly to it anyway — indicating a potentially partial immune response.

This has led scientists to start wondering whether we really know enough about the human immune system’s ability to develop partial T cell “cross-reactivity” to families of closely-related viruses and whether that might predictably and reliably reduce the severity of illness or even reduce the likelihood of getting ill at all when a new-but-related virus appears.   And, that, of course, raises some possibilities that need to be investigated:

  1. Does cross-reactivity explain why some geographic areas that had first pandemic peaks are not seeing second ones — because the people who got sick had no immunity and were more susceptible, and most of the remaining ones have some limited immunity which is protecting them?
  2. Does cross-reactivity explain some of the disparity between people who get deathly sick from COVID-19 and people who are exposed to the virus but never get infected, or, if they do, remain asymptomatic or have only mild illness?  Note that there are two  possibilities:  Cross-reactivity could be making the illness worse or it might be making it less severe — we don’t know yet.
  3. How could cross-reactivity be protective if it develops after prior exposure to coronaviruses, because children are the least likely to get a severe case of the disease and adults are the most susceptible to severe COVID-19 illness and death?  (Children have not had a lifetime of colds, and thus less opportunity to be exposed to coronavirus and develop partial-immunity to SARS-CoV-2)

In short, my best advice as of 21 September 2020 is:

  1. Stay tuned for further developments in the factual realm – both changes in case counts and new research results;
  2. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst as autumn approaches and we all retreat indoors.

COVID-19 Update

Friday, September 18th, 2020

To close out your week we offer a few items that may have flown nap-of-the-earth under your radar.

The AstraZenica/Oxford vaccine bump in the road

On 8 September AstraZenica (AZ) halted its Phase 3 study, because one of its study participants came down with Transverse Myelitis, a neurological condition affecting the spine and caused by infection, immune system disorders or other disorders that can damage or destroy myelin, the fatty tissue that protects nerve cell fibers.

The UK has allowed AZ to restart its study there (AZ is a UK-based company), but as of this writing, the U.S. has not. In fact, in an interview with Kaiser Health News, the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke’s Avindra Nath said “the highest levels of NIH are very concerned.” According to Nath, the NIH has yet to access tissue or blood samples from the patient, who was part of the U.K. portion of AZ’s Phase 3 study. NIH believes AZ is being far too coy with its data. Nath called for the company “to be more forthcoming,” adding that “we would like to see how we can help, but the lack of information makes it difficult to do so.”

Given this halt in the U.S. study, it is not inconceivable that, if the AZ vaccine, known as AZD1222, proves efficacious and safe in the UK, regulators there could approve it for general use well before the U.S. does. This would not make our Commandeer in Chief happy.

The Mask versus Vaccine dust up

Speaking of the Commander in Chief, he recently took CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield for a quick walk to the woodshed for suggesting during testimony to a Senate subcommittee, “Masks are more guaranteed to protect me against COVID-19 than a vaccine.”

President Trump, who is not a doctor, but repeatedly plays one on TV, took exception to this. He publicly chastised Redfield for his comments and said a vaccine could be available in weeks and go “immediately” to the general public. Diminishing the usefulness of masks, despite a wealth of scientific evidence to the contrary, he said his CDC chief was “confused.”

Well, no, he wasn’t. Redfield told subcommittee members that if everyone in the U.S. would wear masks in public the pandemic could be under control within 12 weeks. His issue with a vaccine lies in its degree of immunogenicity, which he suggested would be in the area of 70%, meaning if 100 vaccinated people are exposed to the virus, 30 of them will have insufficient protection to ward it off. Those 30 will probably be comprised of groups who are most susceptible to the vaccine now, like the elderly.

People, masks will be with us for a long time.

Health insurance losses

Before the pandemic, 49% of Americans got health insurance through employer sponsored insurance (ESI). COVID-19 has reduced that percentage, because 6.2 million of our neighbors have lost their jobs and, consequently, their health insurance. When you factor in spouses and children, the number of people who have been shoved out the door into the COVID cold becomes 12 million.

Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have recently documented the losses in a new study. Researchers Josh Bivens and Ben Zipperer write:

  • Extreme churn after February 2020 has led to very large losses in ESI coverage. In March and April, for example, new hiring led to 2.4 million workers gaining ESI coverage each month, but historically large layoffs led to 5.6 million workers losing coverage each month. This rate of lost coverage—over 3 million workers—dwarfs a similar calculation for the number of workers losing coverage each month during the biggest job-losing period of the Great Recession (September 2008–March 2009). Our analysis using the monthly, high-quality measure of the total number of jobs in the economy from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is consistent with 9 million workers having lost access to ESI in March and April 2020 but 2.9 million workers having gained coverage between April and July 2020.

Bivens and Zipperer say about 85% of those who lost ESI coverage were able to gain at least some coverage either through a spouse’s plan, the Affordable Care Act or state Medicaid programs, but that still leaves about a million laid off workers and their familes with nothing. Bivens, Zipperer and others argue the job losses have only worsened the public health crisis created by COVID-19.

Of course, recognizing that millions of people losing employer sponsored health insurance is a public health crisis is not the same as fixing the system to prevent it from happening again. However, as I have written before, having exposed gross inadequacies in the nation’s health care system, COVID-19 also provides opportunities for improvement. What is needed now is the determined motivation and will to make that happen. That is a Herculean task about which I wish I were more optimistic.

Sisyphus Must Have Felt Like This

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020

The COVID-19 boulder, full of facts, lies, information, misinformation, disinformation, and just plain delusional thinking keeps rolling back down the mountain. Try as we might, it’s certainly difficult to make sense of COVID-19. But we keep trying, anyway. As in:

Unions during COVID-19

I have written previously about the perplexing case of union participation in America. In 1960, about a third of hourly workers belonged to unions. In January of this year, the BLS reported that number had dropped to 10.3%. Yet, in the same press release, the BLS reports:

Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 81 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($892 versus $1,095).

Right now we won’t get into why this puzzling paradox exists, except to say we now have another log to throw on the pyre.

A new study authored by researchers at George Washington University, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and the Boston University School of Medicine, published in Health Affairs, found that having a unionized workforce at a nursing home greatly reduces the likelihood that residents or staff will die from COVID-19. From the study’s Abstract:

Health care worker unions were associated with a 1.29 percentage point mortality reduction, which represents a 30% relative decrease in the COVID-19 mortality rate compared to facilities without health care worker unions.

The study analyzed data from more than 300 nursing homes in New York from March 1 through May 31. The authors conclude the unionized health care workers in the nursing homes were able to negotiate for more PPE, higher pay, and better working conditions.

During the pandemic, New York has suffered nearly 7,000 nursing home deaths, more than any other state except New Jersey.

My take on this? If you have loved ones who may be headed for a nursing home, it might be a good idea to ask if the staff is unionized.

Avoiding medical care during COVID-19

Since early in COVID-19, we’ve known that many people, fearful of the disease, have put off getting routine, or, in some cases, emergency medical care. What we have not known is what demographic groups are doing that and to what degree. Now, the CDC has put a full stop period to that issue.

In its 11 September weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, the CDC published a comprehensive analysis concluding 40.9% of U.S. adults delayed or avoided medical care as of June 30. This includes urgent or emergency care (12%) and routine care (32%). Regarding what population segments are doing this, the study had this to say:

The estimated prevalence of urgent or emergency care avoidance was significantly higher among the following groups: unpaid caregivers for adults versus non-caregivers (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] = 2.9); persons with two or more selected underlying medical conditions† versus those without those conditions (aPR = 1.9); persons with health insurance versus those without health insurance (aPR = 1.8); non-Hispanic Black (Black) adults (aPR = 1.6) and Hispanic or Latino (Hispanic) adults (aPR = 1.5) versus non-Hispanic White (White) adults; young adults aged 18–24 years versus adults aged 25–44 years (aPR = 1.5); and persons with disabilities§ versus those without disabilities (aPR = 1.3).*

So, Mary, taking care of her aged mother at home, foregoes either emergency or routine care at nearly three times the rate of Sarah, her next door neighbor who is not burdened with an aged relative, because she doesn’t want to bring COVID-19 home to Mom. Even more troubling is that people with two or more co-morbidities forego care at nearly two times the rate of people without such underlying conditions.

The CDC’s paper advises that, “… urgent efforts are warranted to ensure delivery of services that, if deferred, could result in patient harm.”

Enough said.

*By way of example for the statistically challenged, an adjusted prevalence ratio of 2 means that the prevalence of cases among a study group is 2 times higher than among the control subjects. It’s calculated through a series of regression analyses. There. Now you know.

U. S. life expectancy

COVID-19 has sucked all the air out of any national attempt at healthcare reform, while revealing in sharp detail the foundational flaws in the current system. Eventually, however, America is going to have to confront this issue in a meaningful manner. Healthcare cost in America is still twice the average of all 37 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Americans still have poorer health and lower life expectancy than the average of the member countries (78.7 versus 79.5)

In its latest Health At A Glance publication, the OECD updated its life expectancy data, as shown here:

There are many cracks in our healthcare house that Jack built. Ignoring them is not a strategically viable plan for improvement, improvement that all citizens deserve.

To quote the venerable A. E. Housman, “Terrence, this is stupid stuff.” Another example of our woebegone healthcare system.

Trump’s Nevada rally

Last night, during an ABC-TV Town Hall Meeting President Trump once again pilloried cities and states run by Democrats and blamed their leaders for any problems with the response to COVID-19.

A little contextual background is required here. On 14 April, Trump asserted “absolute authority” to control the nation’s response to the pandemic, saying, “When somebody is president of the United States, your authority is total.” He made it clear he would be in charge and the states would have to fall in line.

Two days later, he reversed himself on a call with all the governors, telling them, “I’ve gotten to know almost all of you, most of you I’ve known and some very well. You are all very capable people, I think in all cases, very capable people. And you’re going to be calling your shots.”

Since then, he has repeatedly repeated the “You’re on your own” line. The result, of course, has been that we have seen 51 different plans and approaches  with varying degrees of success.

Nevada, one of the “you’re on your own” states, is still in the midst of a tough fight against the disease with a Daily Positivity Rate of 7.1% and a Cumulative Positivity Rate of 10.2% as of 10 September.

On 24 June, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak imposed certain restrictions, among them the requirements that all Nevada residents wear masks when in public and that no more than 50 people, socially distanced, congregate in one place.

Enter Donald Trump and his the-sky-is-the-limit indoor rally of last Sunday evening at Xtreme Manufacturing in Henderson, Nevada. Fire officials estimated the size of the crowd was 5,600 people, nearly all of whom were maskless (except for the people right behind Trump who were constantly on full TV view).

Just as we saw in Tulsa after his previous rally, we’ll probably see a spike in cases in Nevada in two to three weeks.

Beyond the nonchalant and willful endangerment to peoples’ lives, what bothers me most of all about this event is Donald Trump’s cavalier and metaphorical raising high of his two middle fingers to Nevada’s scientifically-based efforts to keep its citizens alive. After repeatedly telling the nation’s governors they should do what they think they need to do to combat COVID-19, this “law and order” president, without compunction of any kind, imperiously violates the law while telling his large crowd Nevada’s Governor Sisolak is “a hack” and “weak.”

Allow me to close with Joseph Welsh’s question to Senator Joe McCarthy on 9 June 1954: “Have you no decency, sir?”

 

The Pledge, AstraZenica’s Hiccup, An Important WCRI Study, And An Homage To Bourbon!

Wednesday, September 9th, 2020

Having put The Insider on pause for a few weeks to have some fun researching pandemics in earlier times (they were awful) and to improving my tennis game (it’s pretty good), we now dive back into the blogging fray. Today, we get a running start.

The Pledge

At a press conference on 24 August, President Trump and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn trumpeted (pun very much intended) the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of blood plasma to treat COVID-19 patients.  The Trump/Hahn announcement came less than a week after officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had put a hold on releasing the EUA, saying randomized trials were needed before such an action could occur. The President disagreed, saying, “There are people in the FDA and actually in your larger department [HHS] that can see things being held up and wouldn’t mind so much — its my opinion, a very strong opinion — and that’s for political reasons. We are being very strong and we are being very forthright, and we have some incredible answers, and we’re not going to be held up.”

In yet another example of Olympian Hyperbole, a disease to which Mr. Trump seems to be terminally infected, he also called the EUA a “truly historic announcement,” which puts it alongside something like the Emancipation Proclamation.

Like most of Trump’s hyperbolic pronouncements, the blood plasma EUA created quite the controversy, especially when the FDA released the comments of one of its own scientists tasked with reviewing the appropriateness of the same blood plasma EUA. That scientist— displaying far less enthusiasm than Trump and Hahn, and whose name was redacted from a memo released by the agency — wrote that the data:

 “…support the conclusion that [convalescent plasma] to treat hospitalized patients with COVID-19 meets the ‘may be effective’ criteria for issuance of an EUA. Adequate and well-controlled randomized trials remain nonetheless necessary for a definitive demonstration of … efficacy and to determine the optimal product attributes and the appropriate patient populations for its use.”

After the 24 August press conference, it took about 1.5 nanoseconds for Joe Biden and many media pundits to accuse Trump and Hahn of politicizing the EUA to influence the coming election.

Which brings us to The Pledge.

On 8 September, wanting to get out of firing range, the CEOs of all the leading Western developers of COVID-19 vaccines vowed to only file for FDA approval after demonstrating safety and efficacy in their Phase 3 trials. Their Pledge and descriptions of all nine trials can be found here.

The Pledge also promises all the developers will share some, but not all, of their data to propel their vaccines to the finish line. However, although every CEO wants their vaccine to be the first approved, not one of them wants to get there only for the world  to discover they’ve cut corners and now endanger humanity. These are people who want to go down in history for the right reason.

Mr. Trump will push, prod and kick these vaccine developers to get one of their efforts approved before 3 November. But I have a 95% confidence level none of them will buckle under that pressure. I sure hope I’m right.

AstraZenica’s Hiccup

In an example of the caution just described, yesterday AstraZenica announced  it was putting its Phase 3 vaccine trial on hold, due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom.

This is not an uncommon happening in vaccine development, but it does show how fraught with uncertainties these trials can be. It proves that AZ’s data and safety monitoring group is doing its job, and that’s what is supposed to happen. I previously wrote about all the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates, as well as ChAdOx1, the one being tested by AstraZenica in partnership with the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute.

It is entirely possible we will experience more bumps in the road before one of the developers wins FDA approval.

An Important, New WCRI Study Is Released

Low back pain (LBP) is something that has afflicted humanity since Homo Sapiens decided to stand straight and walk upright. And it’s been the bane of claims adjusters since Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s Iron Chancellor, created the first workers’ compensation program in the 1880s.

Back injuries are the leading cause of all musculoskeletal claims, which are the leading cause of all workers’ compensation claims, and have been since it seems forever. If you’ve ever looked at a workers’ compensation loss run for any hospital in America, you’ll know what I mean.

One of the myriad treatment modalities for these claims is physical therapy (PT). However, it’s always been a bit of a crap shoot as to when to prescribe PT for a patient beset by a work injury resulting in low back pain.

Now, the Workers’ Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) has produced a study that convincingly puts the matter to rest. The study’s conclusion: the earlier PT is begun, the better.

The study, The Timing of Physical Therapy for Low Back Pain: Does It Matter in Workers’ Compensation?, is based on a review of  nearly 26,000 LBP-only claims with more than seven days of lost time from 27 states, with injuries from 1 October 2015, through 31 March 2017, and detailed medical transactions up through 31 March 2018.

One of the many reasons this study is important is that PT can sometimes be the last resort, not the first, in many cases being recommended only after opioids and other invasive procedures have been tried.

The WCRI study found:

  • Later timing of PT initiation is associated with longer temporary disability (TD) duration. On average, the number of TD weeks per claim was 58 percent longer for those with PT initiated more than 30 days post-injury and 24 percent longer for those with PT starting 15 to 30 days post-injury, compared with claims with PT within 3 days post-injury.
  • Workers whose PT treatment started more than 30 days post-injury were 46 and 47 percent more likely to receive opioid prescriptions and MRI, respectively, compared with those who had PT treatment initiated within 3 days of injury. The differences between PT after 30 days post-injury and PT within 3 days post-injury were 29 percent for pain management injections and 89 percent for low back surgeries.
  • The average payment for all medical services received during the first year of treatment was lower for workers with early PT compared with those with late PT. For example, the average medical cost per claim for workers who had PT more than 30 days post-injury was 24 percent higher than for those who had PT within 3 days post-injury.
  • Among claims with PT treatment starting more than 30 days post-injury, the percentage with attorney involvement was considerably higher (27 percent compared with 13–15 percent among those in the early PT groups) and workers received initial medical care much later (on average 18 days compared with 2–3 days in the early PT groups).

If you’re a claims adjuster wary of incurring the cost of sending injured workers with resultant low back pain to PT, this study should make you press the “Reset” button in your mind.

And, finally, an homage to bourbon (which is also good for low back pain)

In the constant sea of terrible, divisive, set-your-hair-on-fire news, we now row to a bipartisan safe harbor: Bourbon.

In the halls of Congress, bipartisanship seems to have gone the way of the Woolly Mammoth. But, reader, that is not the case in the case of Bourbon! That’s because on 2 August 2007, Congress ratified a bill designating September as National Bourbon Heritage Month. More notable, however, is that it passed unanimously. Thus, history shows that amid the countless issues and places and opinions that divide us, nothing unites Americans like bourbon.

And that aint all. A 1964 act declared bourbon “America’s Native Spirit,” making it the only spirit distinctive to the United States, if you don’t count the “spirits” the QAnon folks are worried about.

So, although I can’t stand the stuff, on this first day after 2020’s Labor Day as we all get sucked along the giant tube of political rigarmarole, you might want to consider the nationally endorsed benefits of America’s Native Spirit. Things will still be dire, the President will continue his hyperbolic rants, many of your fellow Americans will continue to “choose liberty” over masks, but you? You’ll hardly notice any of it.