The CDC Reports an increase in Covid by Fred Klonsky

 

My personal measure of Covid cases is echoed in the official numbers. The CDC reports an increase. My Facebook feed shows it too. Every day I see at least one post from someone showing a picture of their positive test result.

 

One of my very good friends in Los Angeles called to say he got hit for the first time ten days ago. His wife was taken down a few days later. Other friends who have evaded the virus for nearly three years have succumbed to it this summer.

 

None have died. None have been hospitalized. But many who are my age are at higher risk for both. Even those who got Covid a year or more ago can get it again. Like me, for example.

 

I got a mild case last year and a bad one again a couple months ago while traveling. Getting Covid while on the road can be rough. We always take a test kit with us and thanks to Paxlovid, telemedicine and a kindly owner of B and B, my isolation was manageable.

 

What’s changed?

 

When Joe Biden officially ended the Covid emergency last May, American healthcare reverted to form. The form being profit above all else. Testing, for example, is no longer free. Covid testing isn’t even covered by most insurance. Major insurers no longer pay for over-the-counter tests once Biden ended the emergency declaration. The Biden administration has stopped mailing test kits to households. The ones you saved may have expired.

 

We now have to decide if buying the $12 test (if we can find one) is worth it. The costs quickly add up for larger families and for people who’ve contracted covid intent on protecting others by following federal guidelines to test repeatedly to end isolation and masking.

 

It is true that now most covid infections are mild but still are a greater danger to the elderly and severely immunocompromised.

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 9,000 covid-19 hospital admissions in the week ending July 29, a 12.5 percent increase from the week before. But that’s far below the nearly 45,000 admissions recorded the same week a year ago. 

 

The percentage of emergency department patients diagnosed with covid-19 has risen gradually in July but is less than a fifth of where it was a year ago. Covid is now being treated like the annual flu.

 

It is now just the normal cost of being sick in America. But in our for-profit healthcare system, unique in the industrialized world, that’s no bargain.

 

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