First Edition: Dec. 22, 2021

KHN: New Parents Slapped With Surprise Bills For Treating Newborns 
After Christine Malik gave birth to her first daughter three years ago, a clinician affiliated with a company called Pediatrix entered the hospital room and fitted the infant with sensors and wires for a hearing test. The child failed the screening required by law for all newborns, the tester said, requiring a follow-up exam. “We were scared as first-time parents,” said Malik, who agreed to the second exam. The clinician, Malik said, didn’t tell them that infants often fail an initial screening because of fluid from the womb in the ears that soon dissipates. The second screening found no problem with the baby’s hearing. (Hancock, 12/22)

KHN: As Pandemic Wears Down Hospital Staff, One Town Offers Groceries To Say Thanks
This mountain community — which comes alive during the winter ski season and annual Sundance Film Festival — is home to the Park City Hospital, which has 460 employees. As in countless hospitals across the country, the demands of covid-19 at times overwhelmed the facility and dramatically changed the way caregivers interact with patients. “The last year and a half has taken a toll on us,” said Jodie Connelly, nurse manager of the intensive care unit at the hospital, which is part of the Intermountain Healthcare System based in Salt Lake City. “Nurses have pretty thick skins, but the pandemic has tested us in ways we’ve never really been tested before.” (Austin, 12/22)

KHN: Layers Of Subcontracted Services Confuse And Frustrate Medi-Cal Patients
Theresa Grant, a resident of Culver City, California, has endured debilitating pain for the past year from a mysterious bulge protruding from her lower rib cage. She takes multiple painkillers every day. And the cause of her agony remains undiagnosed because, despite her tenacious efforts, she hasn’t been able to get a referral to a suitable doctor. Grant, 63, is in Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, the program for people with low incomes. She is enrolled in L.A. Care, one of two managed-care Medi-Cal health plans in Los Angeles County and the largest one in the state, with 2.4 million members. (Wolfson, 12/22)

KHN: ‘An Arm And A Leg’: The Rapid-Test Edition: Who’s Making A Buck? 
Rapid, at-home covid-19 tests are close to essential if you want to see friends and family this holiday season, and do your best to stay safe. But they’re freaking expensive and can be hard to find. What the heck happened? (Weissmann, 12/22)

Roll Call: Biden Issues Dire Warning For Unvaccinated As Omicron Surges Before Holidays
President Joe Biden, just four days before Christmas, sought Tuesday to convince a country craving a normal holiday season that a largely unknown COVID-19 variant will not undo two years of pandemic progress. “Are we going back to March 2020?” Biden said as the omicron variant threatens to deluge hospitals with sick patients. “The answer is absolutely no.” Biden sought to draw a clear contrast when describing how the omicron surge will affect the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, issuing a dire warning to 60 million unvaccinated Americans. (Kopp, 12/21)

The Hill: Biden Preaches Concern, Not Panic On Omicron 
President Biden repeatedly emphasized that the U.S. was in a different position than March 2020, largely because of the wide availability of coronavirus vaccines. There are over 200 million Americans who are fully vaccinated. “We're prepared. We know more. We just have to stay focused," Biden said. (Weixel, 12/21)

The Hill: Five Things To Know About Biden's Omicron Plan
President Biden laid out a plan Tuesday to tackle the new threat of increasing COVID-19 cases across the U.S. that is largely due to omicron quickly becoming the dominant variant. Here are five things to know about the plan. (Sullivan, 12/21)

The New York Times: Omicron Will Surge Despite Biden’s New Plan, Scientists Say.
Even as President Biden on Tuesday outlined new plans for battling the highly contagious Omicron variant, public health experts warned that the measures would not be sufficient to prevent a grim rise in infections and hospitalizations over the next few weeks. The administration’s strategy includes doubling down on vaccination campaigns and propping up hospitals as they confront a large influx of patients. Federal officials will direct resources, including Army doctors, to support health care systems and distribute rapid tests to Americans. (Rabin and Anthes, 12/22)

USA Today: Huge COVID Test Kits Demand Leads To Pharmacy Rationing Purchases
Heavy demand for COVID-19 home test kits, including sellouts at some stores, has led major pharmacy chains to ration individual purchases. Increased interest in testing comes as the nation is experiencing a COVID case surge, with the omicron variant rising quickly in its percentage of diagnoses. Tests are at a premium for holiday travelers hoping to gather safely with family and friends. Customers are limited to four over-the-counter antigen tests at Walgreens pharmacies, while CVS is restricting buyers to six kits. (Keveney, 12/22)

CNN: CVS And Walgreens To Limit Purchases Of At-Home Covid Tests 
The two largest pharmaceutical chain stores in the US -- CVS Health and Walgreens -- are limiting the number of at-home Covid kits customers can buy due to huge demand. The rapid spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant ahead of the holidays has sparked the surge -- and there has been anecdotal evidence over the past week of test shortages at stores across the country. CVS Health acknowledged in a statement on Tuesday that tests may be temporarily out of stock at their stores. "To ensure equitable access to tests both in store and digitally, we've added a limit of six test kits per purchase," the company said. (Alonso, 12/21)

Reuters: Walmart Limits Online Ordering Of COVID-19 Tests To Eight Kits 
Walmart Inc said on Tuesday demand for at-home COVID-19 testing kits was "extremely high" and that it had set a limit of eight test kits per online order. (Soni, 12/21)

The New York Times: All Anyone Wants For Christmas Is A Covid Test
Abbott Laboratories, which made headlines back in August for destroying materials used in its tests, citing limited shelf life, said the company is currently making more than 50 million BinaxNOW rapid antigen test kits every month. In January, the company said, it will increase its output to 70 million a month. “We actually maintained usable test components, many of which have been in short supply during the pandemic — such as reagent bottles, cardboard packaging, swabs, nitrocellulose strips and even paper labeling — so that we could have them in the event that we needed to scale back up, which is exactly what’s happening now,” John Koval, a company spokesman, said in a statement. (Cherelus and Kambhampaty, 12/21)

The Washington Post: Bureau Of Prisons Can Keep Inmates In Home Confinement After Coronavirus Emergency Ends
The Justice Department ruled Tuesday that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is not required to reimprison thousands of federal inmates who were granted home confinement to limit the spread of the coronavirus — even after the federal health emergency ends. The decision reverses a January order issued in the final days of the Trump administration and allows the federal agency to avoid recalling prisoners en masse. (Nakamura, 12/21)

Politico: Biden Justice Department Reverses On Returning Federal Convicts On Home Detention To Prison 
According to the Bureau of Prisons, about 36,000 federal inmates were released early due to the pandemic, largely based on authority Congress included in the CARES Act passed in March 2020. Most have finished serving their sentences, but about 4,500 faced the threat of being returned to prison when the pandemic emergency terminates. (Gerstein, 12/21)

AP: 2021 On Track To Surpass Last Year As Nation's Deadliest 
U.S. health officials say 2021 is shaping up to be even deadlier than last year. It’s too early to say for sure, since all the death reports for November and December won’t be in for many weeks. But based on available information, it seems likely 2021 will surpass last year’s record number of deaths by at least 15,000, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death statistics. Last year was the most lethal in U.S. history, due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. A CDC report being released Wednesday shows 2020 was actually even worse than the agency previously reported. (Stobbe, 12/22)

NBC News: U.S. Death Rate Soared 17 Percent In 2020, Final CDC Mortality Report Concludes
Death rates for Americans ages 15 and older rose sharply in 2020, hitting Black and Hispanic Americans the hardest, according to a report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report — the agency’s finalized data on 2020 death rates — confirmed that life expectancy in the United States fell last year by nearly two years, the largest one-year drop since World War II. (Sullivan, 12/22)

PBS NewsHour: COVID Helped Cause The Biggest Drop In U.S. Life Expectancy Since WWII
COVID-19 helped erase 1.8 years from the average American’s life expectancy in 2020, according to the latest federal mortality data released Wednesday, marking the greatest change in the American lifespan since World War II. During that one brutal year, COVID-19 became the third-most common cause of death in the United States, with one out of 10 fatalities due to the virus. “A loss of two years seems limited, but that’s rolling back decades and decades of progress,” said Dr. Zinzi Diana Bailey, a social epidemiologist at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. “We are going backwards.” (Santhanam, 12/22)

NBC News: U.S. Hospitals Are Once Again 'At A Breaking Point' With Delta And Omicron
Every morning in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, 200 to 400 people wait in an emergency room for a bed to come open. “That’s the highest number ever,” said Dr. J. Kevin Croston, the CEO of North Memorial Health, which operates more than two dozen health care facilities in the area. One of those sites, North Memorial Health Hospital, has brought in a refrigerated truck to help extend its morgue capacity in grim anticipation of what this wave of the pandemic could bring. “We’re at that point in time where there’s so much death they don’t build hospital morgues to handle situations like this,” he said. (Silva, 12/21)

The Boston Globe: Baker Deploys National Guard To Help Stressed Hospitals And Advises Residents To Wear Masks Indoors
Sounding a new urgency over a resurgent pandemic, Governor Charlie Baker on Tuesday deployed the National Guard to help hospitals in Massachusetts struggling with staff shortages and ordered them to cancel nonessential surgeries to accommodate a tide of patients sick with COVID and other serious illnesses. However, Baker stopped short of imposing a statewide mask mandate, instead opting to issue an advisory recommending that people should now wear masks inside public places. (Dayal McCluskey, Freyer and Lazar, 12/21)

The New York Times: Hospitals Scramble As Antibody Treatments Fail Against Omicron 
Hospitals, drug companies and Biden administration officials are racing to address one of the Omicron variant’s biggest threats: Two of the three monoclonal antibody treatments that doctors have depended on to keep Covid-19 patients from becoming seriously ill do not appear to thwart the latest version of the coronavirus. The one such treatment that is still likely to work against Omicron is now so scarce that many doctors and hospitals have already run through their supplies. (Jewett, Zimmer and Robbins, 12/21)

San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco Case Rates Double In Five Days As Omicron Tightens Grip
The highly infectious omicron variant appears to be well established in the Bay Area and likely is fueling outbreaks and early surges in COVID-19 cases across the region, health officials said Tuesday. Case rates have doubled in San Francisco over just the past five days, almost certainly due to omicron spreading in the community, said Dr. Grant Colfax, head of the Department of Public Health. He said the city has now identified 32 omicron cases, but he expects there are many more. (Allday, 12/21)

Bloomberg: Supreme Court Leaves New Mexico’s Vaccine Mandate In Force
A U.S. Supreme Court justice left in force New Mexico’s requirement that many of its health-care workers be vaccinated against Covid-19, turning away a request by a nurse who said she is opposed to the shot after doing her own research. Justice Neil Gorsuch made no comment Tuesday in rejecting the bid by Jennifer Blackford, who contended the mandate violated her right to bodily integrity. Gorsuch chose not to refer the matter to the full court, a step justices normally take when they see a matter as being a close call. (Stohr, 12/21)

AP: Chicago To Require Proof Of Vaccination At Restaurants, Bars 
Chicago will require proof of coronavirus vaccination at restaurants, bars, gyms and other indoor venues, as the rapidly spreading omicron variant drives a spike in COVID-19 infections, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Tuesday. Lightfoot said the requirement will take effect Jan. 3, and will apply to places in the nation’s third-largest city where food and beverages are served — including sport and entertainment venues — and fitness centers. It doesn’t apply to people getting takeout, who stay in a businesses for less than 10 minutes. (Burnett, 12/22)

AP: Atlanta Reinstates Indoor Mask Mandate As Omicron Spreads
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on Tuesday reinstated a mask requirement inside stores and other businesses in the city due to rising COVID-19 infections and the emergence of the extraordinarily contagious omicron variant, which has quickly become the dominant version of the virus in the U.S. The move came as infections in Georgia continued to sprint upward, rising to nearly 6,000 cases detected on Tuesday. The state’s seven-day average of infections has more than doubled in less than a week. (12/22)

AP: De Blasio Says 'No More Shutdowns' As NYC Faces Virus Spike
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he’s committed to keeping the city open as it grapples with a huge spike in coronavirus cases. The Democrat said Tuesday that New York can’t see schools and businesses close again like they did when COVID-19 first hit the city in 2020.De Blasio has faced questions over the past week about whether he would reinstate closures as the omicron variant surges in the city. (Price, 12/22)

The Hill: Delta CEO Asks CDC To Reduce Quarantine Times For Breakthrough COVID-19 Cases 
Delta CEO Ed Bastian on Tuesday asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to shorten quarantine guidelines for breakthrough cases of COVID-19 in people who are fully vaccinated. Delta medical adviser Carlos del Rio and chief health officer Henry Ting joined Bastian in asking CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to reassess the current recommended quarantine time of 10 days when it breakthrough coronavirus cases. The 10-day, isolated quarantine duration negatively impacts their employees, the Delta officials said — employees who "represent an essential workforce to enable Americans who need to travel domestically and internationally." (Choi, 12/21)

NBC News: Omicron Delays Quarter Of Companies’ Reopening Plans, Survey Says
The omicron variant of the coronavirus is forcing many companies to once again change their back-to-the-office plans, upending expectations for whiplashed workers. According to a recent Gartner survey, 44 percent of companies have pushed back or altered their reopening plans because of the omicron variant. (White, 12/21)

The Wall Street Journal: Broadway Hits ‘Hamilton,’ ‘Lion King’ Among Shows To Halt As Covid-19 Cases Rise
Some of the most popular shows on Broadway, including “Hamilton” and “The Lion King,” have canceled performances through Christmas due to Covid-19 outbreaks within their companies. “Jagged Little Pill” said it would end its run altogether. The temporary closures come as the coronavirus pandemic resurges in New York City, with the Omicron variant fueling transmissions and higher test-positivity rates. (Calfas, 12/21)

Bloomberg: NYC Mayor-Elect Eric Adams Postpones Inauguration Ceremony
New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams said in a statement that his inauguration ceremony will be postponed “in order to prioritize the health of all who were planning to attend, cover, and work on this major event.” “It is clear that our city is facing a formidable opponent in the Omicron variant of Covid-19, and that the spike in cases presents a serious risk to public health,” he said. (Sherman, 12/21)

The Wall Street Journal: Long Covid Patients Report Vibrations, Tremors: ‘My Body Is Moving Inside, It’s Jolting’ 
For Kerri McCrossen Morrison, the sensation feels like an electric toothbrush going off in her chest. The feeling is so intense that it wakes her from a deep sleep at times. “It feels like someone put something on my bed and it’s vibrating,” she says. “My body is moving inside, it’s jolting, and at night it’s really bad.” (Reddy, 12/21)

The Washington Post: Possible Weapon Against Omicron: Early Use Of Convalescent Plasma Reduced Hospitalizations 
Convalescent plasma may be another tool to help prevent coronavirus infections sparked by the omicron variant from turning severe if patients receive it soon after developing symptoms, according to data presented Tuesday. ... Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published findings showing that giving plasma early during the course of illness reduced hospitalization by half in a clinical trial that spanned from June 2020 to October 2021. (Shepherd and McGinley, 12/21)

AP: Secret Service: Nearly $100B Stolen In Pandemic Relief Funds
Nearly $100 billion at minimum has been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs set up to help businesses and people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, the U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday. The estimate is based on Secret Service cases and data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration, said Roy Dotson, the agency’s national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator, in an interview. The Secret Service didn’t include COVID-19 fraud cases prosecuted by the Justice Department. (McDermott, 12/22)

The Washington Post: Fauci Says Fox News Host Jesse Watters Should Be Fired For ‘Ambush’ And ‘Kill Shot’ Comments 
Anthony S. Fauci has become accustomed to receiving a barrage of criticism and invective from conservative media personalities. But even he seemed surprised by the comments made about him by Fox News host Jesse Watters on Monday. Onstage at a conservative political conference, Watters encouraged an audience of young conservatives to “ambush” the nation’s top infectious-disease expert and to finish him off with a rhetorical “kill shot” of pointed questions. (Barr, 12/21)

Modern Healthcare: Commercial Prices For Common Hospital Procedures Often Exceed Cash Prices
The discounted cash prices hospitals set for common procedures are often lower than the rates they negotiate with insurers, new research shows. The proportion of hospitals that set their cash price below their median commercial negotiated price ranged from 38.4% for liver tests to 68.5% for C-section deliveries, according to an analysis of 922 hospitals' rates for what CMS calls "shoppable" services. Hospitals were less likely to disclose the prices of more expensive services, the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open found. The findings surprised researches, who expected commercially negotiated rates to be lower because an individual has less bargaining power than insurers. (Kacik, 12/21)

The Hill: Packaged Salad Products Recalled In 19 States
Fresh Express recalled salad products from 19 states on Monday while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating an outbreak related to the packaged salads that has killed at least one person. Fresh Express announced in a press release that products from its Streamwood, Ill., factory have the potential to be contaminated with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes, shortly after the Michigan Department of Agriculture conducted a random sample and found one packaged salad containing the bacteria. (Dress, 12/21)

AP: South Africa's Case Drop May Show Omicron Peak Has Passed
South Africa’s noticeable drop in new COVID-19 cases in recent days may signal that the country’s dramatic omicron-driven surge has passed its peak, medical experts say. Daily virus case counts are notoriously unreliable, as they can be affected by uneven testing, reporting delays and other fluctuations. But they are offering one tantalizing hint — far from conclusive yet — that omicron infections may recede quickly after a ferocious spike. ... After hitting a high of nearly 27,000 new cases nationwide on Thursday, the numbers dropped to about 15,424 on Tuesday. (Meldrum, 12/22)

Reuters: Israel To Offer Fourth COVID-19 Vaccine Dose In Bid To Outpace Omicron 
Israel is to offer a fourth dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to people older than 60 or with compromised immune systems, and to health workers, as part of a drive to ramp up the shots and outpace the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. A Health Ministry expert panel - whose findings have yet to be implemented - recommended on Tuesday that those eligible receive the fourth shot at least four months after receiving their third. (12/22)

CIDRAP: Study: 0 Of 107 French Teens With MIS-C Fully Vaccinated Against COVID-19
A study of 107 French teens hospitalized with the COVID-19–related multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) shows that none had been fully vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, and only 7 had received one dose. (12/21)

CIDRAP: Report Underscores Superbug Risk Of Medical Tourism 
An investigation led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has linked an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant infections among US medical tourists in 2018 and 2019 to a single facility and surgeon in Mexico. The results of the investigation, published last week in Emerging Infectious Diseases, revealed that 38 US patients who traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, for bariatric surgery from January 2018 through December 2019 came back with an infection caused by carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa—a virulent and opportunistic pathogen capable of causing severe illness. Of the 38 patients, 31 were operated on by the same surgeon, with 27 undergoing surgery at the same facility. (Dall, 12/21)

Stat: 3 Issues To Watch In Global Health In 2022
Welcome to Year 3 of the Age of Covid. We’d hoped by now, with the country awash with vaccine doses, that the pandemic would have entered a different phase. We frankly thought that, after the stunning science that brought multiple SARS-CoV-2 vaccines into use around the globe in less than a year, countries with highly vaccinated populations might be heading toward a time when humans and SARS-2 could co-exist in a way that didn’t crash hospital systems and end lives. But the dastardly virus keeps upping the ante. (Branswell, 12/22)