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Hospitals are poised to face the kind of life-and-death decisions that industrialized countries typically encounter only in times of war and natural disaster.

wo weeks ago, a man came to an emergency room in New York with pain in the lower-right quadrant of his abdomen.

A CT scan showed inflammation around a fingerlike projection at the base of his colon.

The number of hospitalizations related to Covid-19 among adolescents in the United States was about three times as high as hospitalizations linked to influenza over three recent flu seasons, the study found.

Children have a much lower likelihood overall of becoming severely ill or dying from Covid-19, compared with adults, but the risks are thought to increase with age. According to the most recent data collected by the academy, nearly four million children have tested positive for the coronavirus since the pandemic began, compared with about 30 million cases among adults.

Still, about 16,500 children have been hospitalized for Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 322 have died, making it one of the leading causes of death among children, Dr. Maldonado noted.

India hospital transfusions infect thousands with HIV

At least 2,234 Indians have contracted the deadly HIV virus while receiving

blood transfusions in hospitals in the past 17 months alone.

Every German resident must belong to a sickness fund, and in turn the funds must insure all comers. They’re also mandated to cover a standard set of benefits, which includes most procedures and medications. Workers pay half the cost of their sickness fund insurance, and employers pay the rest. The German government foots the bill for the unemployed and for children. There are also limits on out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s rare for a German to go into debt because of medical bills.

this is very similar to the health-insurance regime that Americans are now living under, now that the Affordable Care Act is four years old and a few days past its first enrollment deadline.

There are, of course, a few key differences. Co-pays in the German system are minuscule, about 10 euros per visit. Even those for hospital stays are laughably small by American standards: Sam payed 40 euro for a three-day stay for a minor operation a few years ago

"We ended up getting our first positive patients -- and that's when all hell broke loose," said one New York City doctor.

"We don't have the machines, we don't have the beds," the doctor said.

"To think that we're in New York City and this is happening," he added. "It's like a third-world country type of scenario. It's mind-blowing."

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.

This contagion has a weakness.

A friend walked up and grabbed Lockett by the arm. A few people, noticing that something wasn’t right, walked Lockett to another room and called an ambulance. Lockett, who was 57 at the time and uninsured, didn’t know whether she could or should refuse the ambulance ride or decide which hospital it would take her to.Paramedics sped her a few miles to Emory University Hospital Midtown, where she was held overnight. It turned out that she had suffered a transient ischemic attack, or a mini-stroke. The hospital performed tests and sent her home, where she recovered fully.In May, the hospital bill arrived. Lockett had been charged $26,203.62 total for “observation,” which the bill instructed her to pay within 20 day

nearly 60 percent of people who have filed for bankruptcy said a medical expense “very much” or “somewhat” contributed to their bankruptcy

A 2016 study found that a third of cancer survivors had gone into debt as a result of their medical expenses, and 3 percent had filed for bankruptcy. According to a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau study from 2014, medical bills are the most common cause of unpaid bills sent to collection agencies. About a fifth of Americans have a medical claim on their credit report, and the same proportion currently has a medical bill overdue.

The coronavirus crisis in Georgia is spiraling as the mayor of Atlanta has warned that intensive care unit (ICU) beds in the city have reached capacity even though the level of the virus in the state is probably still far from its peak.

With more than 1,200 cases across the southern state, according to Georgia’s department of health, the state’s largest hospital, Grady Memorial, has been down at least 200 ICU beds since December due to a flood, a hospital staff member with knowledge of the hospital’s situation tells the Guardian.

Nearly one out of six cases in the state are in the Atlanta metro area. Unlike other US centers of the crisis such as New York, where large convention facilities are being used to place more beds, ventilators and supplies, that has not been the case in Atlanta.

They call them corona taxis: Medics outfitted in protective gear, driving around the empty streets of Heidelberg to check on patients who are at home, five or six days into being sick with the coronavirus.They take a blood test, looking for signs that a patient is about to go into a steep decline. They might suggest hospitalization, even to a patient who has only mild symptoms; the chances of surviving that decline are vastly improved by being in a hospital when it begins.

Heidelberg’s corona taxis are only one initiative in one city. But they illustrate a level of engagement and a commitment of public resources in fighting the epidemic that help explain one of the most intriguing puzzles of the pandemic: Why is Germany’s death rate so low?

According to Johns Hopkins University, the country had more than 92,000 laboratory-confirmed infections as of midday Saturday, more than any other country except the United States, Italy and Spain.

President Biden on Tuesday is set to announce new steps to reach rural Americans in the push to get as many people as possible vaccinated for the coronavirus

It has prioritized a list of doctors enrolled in the vaccine system based on a "social vulnerability index" used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including doctors in many rural communities — and has been asking state government to send vaccine doses to those doctors, the official said.

The administration also plans to work with states to enroll more pediatricians and family doctors in their vaccine systems so they can begin giving people vaccines, a step that becomes "particularly critical" if the Food and Drug Administration gives emergency authorization for adolescents ages 12-15 to start getting the Pfizer vaccine, the official said.

the federal government came nowhere close to vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, as it had promised.

Three weeks into the most ambitious vaccination campaign in modern U.S. history, far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.

Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures

It took about 90 days for the United States to reach its first 2 million cases of coronavirus last year.

But it took just 10 days to hit 2.2 million cases in 2021, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

But officials say many Americans did the opposite over the holidays, gathering with friends or extended family. Now the consequences are becoming more evident in packed hospitals across the country.

America did not sufficiently plan for how to get millions of people vaccinated.

How poorly? Untold numbers of vaccine doses will expire before they can be injected into American arms, while communities around the country are reporting more corpses than their mortuaries can handle.

Operation Warp Speed has failed to come anywhere close to its original goal of vaccinating 20 million people against the coronavirus by the end of 2020.

Government officials warned that hackers were seeking to hold American hospitals’ data hostage in exchange for ransom payments.

The Russian hackers, believed to be based in Moscow and St. Petersburg, have been trading a list of more than 400 hospitals they plan to target, according to Alex Holden, the founder of Hold Security, who shared the information with the F.B.I. Mr. Holden said the hackers claimed to have already infected more than 30 of them.

linics and medical complexes are intended to take those facilities offline and hold their data hostage in exchange for multimillion-dollar ransom payments

An end to the Covid-19 pandemic may be in sight with more good news on vaccine candidates, but for now "this will get worse," a top US official said Wednesday.

"We have had one million cases documented over the past week, our rate of rise is higher than it even was in the summer, we have hospitalizations going up 25% week over week,"

"There are so many more cases that we have, that deaths are going up."

China was the first country to experience the panic of Covid when it emerged from Wuhan in 2019. Then, for the past three years, the country largely suppressed the virus with a costly mix of mass testing, strict lockdowns and border closures. The government could have used the time to bolster its health system by stockpiling medicine and building more critical care units. It could have launched a major vaccination drive targeting the millions of vulnerable older adults who were reluctant to receive a jab or booster. China did little of that, however, plunging into crisis mode again like in the early days of Wuhan.

A Shanghai hospital predicted half of Shanghai’s 25 million residents would eventually be infected and warned its staff of a “tragic battle” in the coming weeks, according to a now-deleted statement the hospital posted last week on the social media platform WeChat.

“In this tragic battle, all of Shanghai will fall, and all the staff of the hospital will be infected! Our whole families will be infected! Our patients will all be infected!” the statement read. “We have no choice, and we cannot escape.”

Kaiser has sophisticated electronic records and computer systems that — after 10 years and $30 billion in technology spending — have led to better-coordinated patient care, another goal of the president. And because the plan is paid a fixed amount for medical care per member, there is a strong financial incentive to keep people healthy and out of the hospital, the same goal of the hundreds of accountable care organizations now being created.

Kaiser has yet to achieve the holy grail of delivering that care at a low enough cost. He says he and other health systems must fundamentally rethink what they do or risk having cost controls imposed on them either by the government or by employers, who are absorbing the bulk of health insurance costs. “We think the future of health care is going to be rationing or re-engineering,”

the way to get costs lower is to move care farther and farther from the hospital setting — and even out of doctors’ offices. Kaiser is experimenting with ways to provide care at home or over the Internet, without the need for a physical office visit at all.

In the Bost Hospital here, a teenage mother named Bibi Sherina sits on a bed in the severe acute malnutrition ward with her two children. Ahmed, at just 3 months old, looks bigger than his emaciated brother Mohammad, who is a year and a half and weighs 10 pounds.

Afghan hospitals like Bost, in the capital of war-torn Helmand Province, have been registering significant increases in severe malnutrition among children. Countrywide, such cases have increased by 50 percent or more compared with 2012, according to United Nations figures. Doctors report similar situations in Kandahar, Farah, Kunar, Paktia and Paktika Provinces — all places where warfare has disrupted people’s lives and pushed many vulnerable poor over the nutritional edge.

Reasons for the increase remain uncertain, or in dispute. Most doctors and aid workers agree that continuing war and refugee displacement are contributing. Some believe that the growing number of child patients may be at least partly a good sign, as more poor Afghans are hearing about treatment available to them.

The state of Florida is putting thousands of children with heart defects at risk, a group of cardiac doctors say, because of a change in policy that came after Tenet Healthcare contributed $200,000 to Florida Republicans.

Less than two months later, the state decided to get rid of those standards.

The whole situation is outrageous. It's just outrageous," said Louis St. Petery

(CNN) — The Ayre Gran Hotel Colón is a four-star, 365-room design hotel in downtown Madrid close to Retiro Park and one of the city's largest hospitals.

With global travel at a standstill -- and millions of people projected to contract Covid-19 in the coming months -- governments around the world are looking to otherwise closed hotels as a way to alleviate stresses on overburdened health systems.

The latter was a strategy utilized by officials in Wuhan, China, who erected specialized facilities -- or in some cases, commandeered hotels -- to isolate doctors and nurses. Health workers, of course, are at a higher risk of contracting the illness and subsequently passing it on to their families or fellow commuters.