Hospitalizations hit 100k in United States for first time since January

[simonsarris]

according to Our World in Data they hit 133k in January and are only 89k right now, and approx flat for the last 5 days:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

[nlitened]

Will these hospitalized people be also financially ruined? Or is emergency COVID care free of charge?

[aschampion]

At one point in 2020 a majority of insured Americans treated for COVID (>80%) had the majority of their COVID-related treatment waived by the insurer. However, most insurers have been terminating these waivers since January.

Also, to any non-Americans its always important to put this in the context that "waiving" here means you're still paying thousands per month (between employer and individual) in premiums and likely hundreds in various flavors of co-jargons anytime you step the foot in the door of a care provider even for "covered" care. Insurers always like to portray just providing the service you pay more for than you would in most of the rest of the world as altruism on their part. The major insurance companies providing these waivers (Anthem, UnitedHealth, etc.) all saw order $B profit increases over the pandemic.

[kingsloi]

Based on how much my little girl’s ICU admission cost,

https://kingsley.sh/posts/2021/two-weeks-in-the-icu-as-a-bab...

there is no way (in my mind) that their ICU admission will be free.

[mattrighetti]

You can be ensured or not, it depends. Honestly it’s pretty stupid to end up in ICU when something free has been offered to you in order to avoid just that, so people should just take their responsibility.

[MontyCarloHall]

Delta Air Lines is imposing a $200 monthly healthcare surcharge on unvaccinated employees, citing an average cost of $50k for a COVID-related hospital stay, which were appreciably affecting company health care policy expenses [0].

I wonder when insurers will follow suit. All these totally preventable hospital stays aren’t cheap, and insurers aren’t charities.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/delta-air-lines-to-impose-200-m...

[swarnie_]

You've had the vaccine for longer then almost anyone, what's happening?

[orbifold]

The vaccine does unfortunately not work as well as hoped for in the case of the delta variant + a lot of people are still unvaccinated and delta is much more infectious. Cases and hospitalisations are also up in Israel https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m.... Here is a corresponding news item in Science: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-.... It also suggests that the protection against hospitalisation of the vaccine is not as good as it was hoped for among older people. From the publicly available data for Israel you can estimate the vaccine efficacy against hospitalisations to be ~59% (relative risk reduction).

[whatever1]

The states with the low vaccination rates are now paying the price of their politics.

[benjaminwootton]

Haven’t they been open for most of the year?

I know people would love to see them fail, but the fact the wave randomly hits them now shows the lack of correlation with restrictions and masks, no?

Wasn’t California topping the charts at points this year?

[mikem170]

There might be a pattern, both of these states (and some other southern states I sampled) had surges in during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, unlike some northern states, like NY [0].

Perhaps because everyone is hiding inside with the air conditioning to escape the heat?

[0] https://www.statnews.com/feature/coronavirus/covid-19-tracke...

[refurb]

Being two of the most populous states, no, not a big surprise!

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell. We're trying for something different here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Edit: please don't post unsubstantive/flamebait comments generally - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28314687 was another one.

[antisthenes]

As an economist and a cultural transplant to the US, I'll never understand this.

How can politics/party lines be stronger than rational self-interest? It just doesn't compute in my head, and never will for the rest of my life.

I know these people are not the majority, but their fraction is still large enough to amount to millions of people. It's absolutely mind-boggling.