The Codcast

Baker pressed on Holyoke labor agreement by CommonWealth Beacon

Vaccines may be here, but the need for COVID-19 testing is not going away any time soon.

That’s the prediction of Tim Rowe, the CEO of CIC Health, a private company that has been overseeing COVID-19 testing programs and also running mass vaccination sites in Massachusetts.

“We are going to have a period of time where not everyone has the vaccine,” Rowe said. “And it's a little unclear what younger age groups will yet have the vaccine. And we have a world which is going to have storming COVID.” Rowe said the current forecast is it will take four years for the world to reach herd immunity, which means there is the possibility of new virus strains developing in other countries and migrating to the US.

“So if you are a policymaker making a plan for the fall and you want kids in school and you want to get us back to something like the economy that we had prior to the pandemic, you probably want to have in place a system that you know is going to work to track is there disease spreading?” Rowe said. “If it's spreading, what strains are they? And if there's a significant population which is not protected by vaccines - and that may be a lot of the kids in this country - you want to make sure that they're not spreading that disease within society.”

Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser is one of the foremost thinkers about the role played by cities. His 2011 book "The Triumph of the City" lays out all the ways cities have been central drivers of human civilization and innovation. Could the pandemic lead to a long-term repositioning of their role? Yes and no, he says on this episode of The Codcast.

Dr. Eric Dickson, the CEO of UMass Memorial Health Care, says the health care inequities that have surfaced during the coronavirus pandemic can be addressed through policies that help hospitals like his that cater to some of the poorest people in the state.

On The Codcast with John McDonough of the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard and Paul Hattis, formerly of Tufts University Medical School, Dickson outlined three key policies to improve health care equity – stop the expansion of Mass General Brigham into Westborough, Westwood, and Woburn; raise Medicaid payment rates; and make Medicare available to more people by steadily lowering the age of eligibility.

All three policies center around the way hospital care is paid for, with Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and elderly, paying lower rates than commercial health insurers. The disparity in payment rates means hospitals that cater to the poor rely more on Medicaid funding and can only survive if they are cross-subsidized by higher payments from commercial insurers.

As it is, UMass Memorial is just breaking even, Dickson said. “We can keep the lights on but having dollars to invest in new buildings and technologies, that comes really hard to us,” he said.

Danielle Allen is a scholar of Athenian democracy who has decided that she may have something to offer to the practice of democracy in 21st century Massachusetts. The Harvard professor announced in December that she was launching an exploratory run for governor,

Four questions for MBTA GM Steve Poftak by CommonWealth Beacon

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell is of two minds about Vineyard Wind, which after lengthy regulatory delays seems poised to finally get underway.

The mayor is excited about the potential for offshore wind farms to transform New Bedford the way they have many older European port cities, but he also worries that Massachusetts may be missing the boat when it comes to capturing the true value of the industry.

“Offshore wind is really a generational opportunity for a city like ours to leverage its competitive advantages in a way that brings in investment, creates jobs, and improves a city’s quality of life,” Mitchell said.

Suffolk DA Rachael Rollins and the no-prosecution study findings by CommonWealth Beacon

The US could have prevented the surge of COVID-19 cases this winter that killed hundreds of thousands of people if only the FDA had approved methods for at-home rapid testing and made the tests widely available. That is the argument made by Dr. Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, one of the country’s strongest proponents for the use of at-home rapid COVID-19 tests.

“Had the regulatory barriers been broken down in the summer last year, and the companies that could produce these were actually allowed to produce them at scale…we could have seen the surges of the fall and winter that happened and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, those could have largely been prevented,” Mina said on The Codcast.

Beacon Hill's public health priorities by CommonWealth Beacon