At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared a federal public health emergency. The public health emergency impacted the cost of COVID-19 tests, vaccines and treatments; flexibility around telehealth appointments; and added flexibility for providers.
The federal government’s emergency declaration for the COVID-19 pandemic expired Thursday. The end of the emergency order marks the end of federal government funding for COVID-19-related resources. That means it will make vaccination, testing and treatment more expensive for many, and it will change the way that data about the virus is collected and shared.
The end of the COVID Emergency will also lead to many losing their Medicaid eligibility. As many as 24 million people will no longer receive Medicaid.
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Will COVID tests and treatments still be available?
Yes — but they could get more expensive. According to the CDC, private insurance companies may not cover at-home testing any more after the emergency order ends.
The CDC has also stated that treatments like Paxlovid will soon come at a price. Moving forward, the cost of antivirals will be determined by manufacturers and your health insurance company. There probably will be some out of pocket cost, even with insurance. This may make the medication inaccessible to some people.
"The end of the public health emergency essentially brings a return to how the American health system worked before the pandemic," said Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. "That means coverage and costs can be complicated and hard to navigate."
“Older Americans with Medicare will no longer be guaranteed free at-home tests. Nor treatment.” The exact cost of these things for average Americans has yet to be seen.
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Is COVID Over?
About 300 Americans still die every day from the virus, according to Dr. Gregory Poland, the director of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic. He added that since the pandemic began, it has killed one out of every 282 Americans & that new, potentially harmful variants of the virus can still emerge.
“When you declare an end to the public health emergency, that doesn’t mean an end for all time,” he said in Wednesday’s briefing. “We could very well, this fall for example, see a new variant that could be even more immune-evasive and would require going back to some level of mitigation procedures.”
Dr Stites added that the healthcare community has struggled to impress the importance of protective measures, which include vaccination, regular testing, mask-wearing and social distancing, onto the public.
“Americans have accepted the morbidity associated with COVID because the lifestyle changes - that we have to make to avoid it - are too difficult. Or people just don’t want to do them over a long period of time,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a really hard battle to ever get public health measures like masking and distancing back in effect, unless the human toll is so great that people are scared to not do it.”
In other words, a future COVID wave and death toll would have to be even “worse” than any that the US has already seen, which caused the death of over 1.1 Million of its citizens.
Unless it is them directly, most individuals also aren’t interested in the undetermined number of Americans now left with a variety of life changing, long term, chronic illnesses (that wouldn’t have otherwise happened without being infected with COVID).
Most Americans no longer want to even think about COVID. Therefore, most also will not accept any future restrictions put on them again for any reason: short of a disease with the astronomical death toll of MERS and the high transmission rate of Omicron. That’s just how things now are…
A virus that has already killed 1 out of every 282 Americans is not severe enough for people to be willing to go back to strict COVID (or any other illness) prevention measures.
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May 11, 2023 is “Face Freedom Day” for many medical workers.
Masks will no longer be required by staff at nursing homes where many of the most vulnerable to severe COVID and death reside. Ditto with hospitals.
A top public health official on the White House former coronavirus task force has addressed the question of what measures more vulnerable-to-COVID citizens should now do with America returning to pre COVID life.
“Vulnerable individuals should decide what additional levels of protection they want. Some may still wish to mask in indoor crowded spaces, in which case they should be sure to wear a high-quality, well-fitting mask in these places. Others may continue to test before indoor get-togethers or, especially as the weather is getting warmer, prefer to gather outdoors. All of these are reasonable precautions to be taking for those at high risk for severe outcomes from Covid-19 and for those who continue to prioritize avoiding the coronavirus.”
However, none of this may be possible for those in group living situations where protection must come from the staff and other measures. Nevertheless, pandemic era protections have now been lifted for all.
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America is Open
Another big change this week is that unvaccinated foreign travelers (from anywhere in the world) can finally enter the United States.
Ending the COVID health emergency order May 11th has also lifted the pandemic restriction on border crossing. Large numbers of migrants have gathered at the Mexico-U.S. border and are expected to enter the country in the coming weeks, further straining already overwhelmed staff and facilities.
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How will COVID data reporting change?
The biggest change is that new case numbers and death totals from COVID-19 will no longer be emphasized.
"Beyond the individual-level services (vaccines & tests) that the health emergencies made possible, community, state, and national programs kept the public informed with near real-time data about where cases were increasing. That helped states to direct resources such as testing and treatments to those communities and alert people if their risk of getting infected was high. But most of these surveillance systems have gone or are going away.
"As the public health emergency sunsets, data on COVID-19 won’t be as readily available moving forward. The CDC will lose access to some critical data it has used to measure the intensity of the pandemic, which it also used to guide its policies in combating the virus. As CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky (now soon to leave the CDC) said during a Senate committee hearing: “We (the CDC) will lose our percent positivity. We won’t get laboratory reporting. We won’t get case reporting.”
With the emergency order now gone, a general percentage of COVID-19 related deaths will now be the main indicator of the pandemic’s future trajectory. Limited data reporting will probably come with some delay. Although the medical community now knows more about COVID in 2023 than they did in 2020, tracking the virus will once again more or less go back to how things were when the Pandemic first started. Good or bad or indifferent? We’ll see.
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Now What???
“New global guidelines for long-term disease management of COVID-19 urged countries “to maintain sufficient capacity, operational readiness and flexibility to scale up during surges of COVID-19, while maintaining other essential health services and preparing for the emergence of new variants with increased severity or capacity.” The question is: will the US be able to do this now that the Emergency Order has ended.
Former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx recently warned that the omicron COVID-19 variant continues to mutate and may become resistant to existing treatments. She called for more federally funded research into therapeutics and durable vaccines that protect against many variants.
“Birx’s warnings come as remaining states have ended their COVID-19 press briefings and shut down their exposure notification systems, and the federal government has ended its free COVID-19 at-home test program. With the end of the emergency, the CDC is also changing the way it presents its COVID-19 data to a “sustainable national COVID-19 surveillance” model.
“A shift in COVID-19 monitoring
and communication strategies accompanying the end of the emergency
means that the virus is disappearing from the headlines,
even though it has not disappeared from our lives and communities.”
COVID is still with us. However, the US Federal government will no longer pay for future COVID vaccines nor treatments. Plus, COVID tracking will now be at a minimum.
Those, not directly impacted by COVID, can take all this to mean COVID no longer exists. They may pretend to themselves and others that all danger from the virus is totally and forever gone. Unfortunately, they are wrong.
How wrong? Only time will tell. Improved vaccines in the future may someday neutralize most all of COVID current dangers. But for now, we are at a period of time between raging pandemic and being kept virus free through more effective vaccines.
Meanwhile, many Americans are not able to enjoy the country's current return to total "freedom" https://pbase.com/britestar/image/173481431 . Others may now be open to new risks based on not being able to pay for COVID prevention and care. Living in a world with COVID (even without it dominating the news everyday) is much more complex than life was back in 2019 before this "novel" coronavirus came out of China. For a while, the federal government helped people in the US to navigate this virus. Now, everyone is on their own.
