Meanwhile, Republicans are holding up new emergency legislation to combat COVID-19 because the bill House Democrats are putting forward sets a limit on how much drug companies can charge for a vaccine.
House and Senate leaders have run into last-minute snags on a $7.5 billion emergency package to combat the U.S. spread of coronavirus, including disputes over vaccine availability and hospital reimbursement costs.
Top Democrats say the House is still expected to vote on the package Wednesday, with the Senate likely to follow suit as soon as Thursday. But the timeline for unveiling that legislation has slipped, possibly as late as Wednesday morning, amid policy fights between the two parties.
With the number of U.S. cases steadily rising, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to find a deal that could pass both chambers this week, doling out money quickly to state and local health departments.
The biggest issue, according to several people familiar with negotiations, involves a Democratic attempt to control the costs of vaccines and other treatments that are developed in response to the outbreak. Other issues include details of hospital reimbursement for uninsured patients and whether to pay for a provision to help expand telemedicine, which would cost roughly $500 million.
“Vaccines should be affordable. It’s just as simple as that,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a top appropriator, said as she left a Democratic leadership meeting on Tuesday night.
“It’s going back and forth. That’s where we are,” DeLauro added. “There are no firm answers at the moment, but we’re moving toward getting this done and getting it done this week because the need is so critical. We have to get it done this week.”
Pelosi and her top deputies briefed their fellow Democrats on the status of the emergency funding package on Tuesday night and outlined the remaining issues. A final deal could still be reached Tuesday night, they said, but could take until Wednesday morning.
Republicans still want people who can't afford the vaccine to get sick and die. Period. Full stop. And yes, COVID-19 is deadlier than originally thought. Surprise!
World health officials said Tuesday the mortality rate for COVID-19 is 3.4% globally, higher than previous estimates of about 2%.
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected, he said.
The World Health Organization had said last week that the mortality rate of COVID-19 can differ, ranging from 0.7% to up to 4%, depending on the quality of the health-care system where it’s treated. Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3%.
During a press briefing Monday, WHO officials said they don’t know how COVID-19 behaves, saying it’s not like influenza. They added that while much is known about the seasonal flu, such as how it’s transmitted and what treatments work to suppress the disease, that same information is still in question when it comes to the coronavirus.
Even a lowball estimate of 40% of adults infected and an 0.7% mortality rate, that's 600,000 dead. Even if only 1% get infected and it's not an epidemic, that's still 15,000 dead, an extra 50% of a bad flu season's casualties.
And the high end, well...70% of the country's adults infected and 3.4% dead, well that's a number roughly the size of the Boston metro area.
The only question is how bad this is going to be.
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