The pandemic has highlighted weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the country’s healthcare and public health systems. For example, primary care and public health have been underfunded in the United States, limiting their ability to react to the pandemic. The United States allocates about 6% of national healthcare spending on primary care, which is less than half of the average expenditure on primary care in other high-income countries.

Health systems, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations have reported significant decreases in service utilization in the early months of the pandemic linked to patient concern over becoming infected with COVID-19 in a healthcare setting. In a September 2020 New Jersey Hospital Association survey of a representative sampling of Garden State adults, 83% of survey respondents reported being concerned about going to a hospital due to fear of contracting COVID-19.

Hospitals, like Riverside, with high rates of COVID patients who didn’t have the diagnosis when they were admitted have rarely been held accountable due to multiple gaps in government oversight, a KHN investigation has found. While a federal reporting system closely tracks hospital-acquired infections for MRSA and other bugs, it doesn’t publicly report covid caught in individual hospitals.

The spreading of misinformation about COVID-19, which has included false or misleading information from some physicians, has been a troubling aspect of the coronavirus pandemic. The misinformation has included erroneous recommendations related to treatments and vaccination.

According to the memo, CMS “will not enforce the new rule regarding vaccination of health care workers or requirements for policies and procedures in certified Medicare/Medicaid providers and suppliers (including nursing facilities, hospitals, dialysis facilities and all other provider types covered by the rule) while there are court-ordered injunctions in place prohibiting enforcement of this provision.”

The ETS, according to OSHA, is designed to “protect workers from the spread of coronavirus on the job.” Employers with 100 or more employees “must develop, implement and enforce a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy, unless they adopt a policy requiring employees to either get vaccinated or undergo regular COVID-19 testing and wear a face covering at work.”

The research article, which was published by JAMA Network Open, is based on survey data collected from more than 1,300 healthcare professionals in 2020 before vaccinations for COVID-19 were available. The surveys were conducted in two phases from April 24 to May 30, 2020, and Oct. 24 to Nov. 30, 2020.

Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Labor November 23 asked a federal appeals court to lift judicial restrictions on an Occupational Safety and Health Administration emergency temporary standard requiring employers with 100 or more employees to implement a program of COVID-19 vaccination or regular testing and face coverings to protect unvaccinated workers.

One of the more mysterious characteristics of COVID-19 is that a significant number of patients who are long haulers experience symptoms for weeks or months after recovering from the acute phase of the illness. Coronavirus long haulers have a range of physical symptoms, including cough, shortness of breath, constitutional symptoms such as numbness and tingling, cardiac issues, hair loss, and deconditioning.

OSHA has suspended enforcement of its COVID-19 vaccination and testing emergency temporary standard (ETS) while the requirement is challenged in court, according to a statement on the agency’s ETS information website.