{"id":169974,"date":"2020-05-04T19:30:17","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T23:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.countingpips.com\/?p=169974"},"modified":"2020-05-04T19:25:29","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T23:25:29","slug":"coronavirus-medical-costs-could-soar-into-hundreds-of-billions-as-more-americans-become-infected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2020\/05\/coronavirus-medical-costs-could-soar-into-hundreds-of-billions-as-more-americans-become-infected\/","title":{"rendered":"Coronavirus medical costs could soar into hundreds of billions as more Americans become infected"},"content":{"rendered":"
May 4, 2020<\/div>
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By Bruce Y. Lee<\/a>, <\/strong>City University of New York<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

As states push to reopen businesses, arguing their economies are losing too much money under current coronavirus precautions, they can\u2019t ignore the other side of the economic equation \u2013 the one involving human lives and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in medical costs.<\/p>\n

More than 20,000 new COVID-19 cases<\/a> are still being reported in the U.S. every day, and the coronavirus that causes it is still spreading.<\/p>\n

If the U.S. reopens its economy prematurely and COVID-19 cases surge again, medical expenses will surge, too. Someone has to pay those costs. If you own a business, pay for health insurance<\/a> or pay taxes, that someone is you.<\/p>\n

To get a better sense of what the nation\u2019s COVID-19-related health care costs could be as more and more of the population is infected, our Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research<\/a> team at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy<\/a> developed a computer simulation of the entire United States.<\/p>\n

It allows us to quantify what could happen depending on how the pandemic progresses and the resulting direct medical costs and health care resource needs. The results were published<\/a> in the journal Health Affairs.<\/p>

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Building a Sim nation for COVID-19<\/h2>\n

Our team develops computer simulation models to help decision-makers better understand and address different infectious diseases, including MRSA<\/a>, the flu<\/a>, Zika<\/a> and Ebola<\/a>. During the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the team was embedded in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services<\/a> to help with the national response.<\/p>\n

These models try to recreate all of the people, processes, resources and systems involved in a given health or public issue, such as a pandemic, to serve as virtual worlds to test different possible scenarios, policies and interventions and calculate the expected costs.<\/p>\n

For this latest coronavirus model, we created virtual representations of the entire U.S. population.<\/p>\n

Each virtual person had probabilities of becoming infected with the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Like a real person, the virtual person had chances of developing mild or severe symptoms, or having no symptoms at all during the course of the infection. No symptoms naturally meant no health costs.<\/p>\n

How medical costs pile up<\/h2>\n

If the person developed symptoms, what happened next depended on how severe the symptoms became and what the person ended up doing.<\/p>\n

For example, treating a child with only a mild illness requiring no more than a telephone call to a doctor would typically cost around US$32 (in most cases ranging from $19 to $56). The cost for an adult in the same situation would be about $17 (in most cases ranging from $16 to $67). Our model incorporated the variations in costs that occur, so that two people could have the exact same paths, yet still have different costs.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, costs increased substantially if the person had more severe symptoms that required hospitalization.<\/p>\n

The costs of a hospital bed, health care personnel, medications and potentially the use of medical equipment such as ventilators quickly add up, pushing up the median cost for a person hospitalized to $14,366.<\/p>\n

Most COVID-19 patients don\u2019t require hospitalization, so the median cost for any person with symptoms turned out to be $3,045 during the course of the person\u2019s infection. But this is still over four times the typical cost of a symptomatic influenza case<\/a> and around 5.5 times that of a symptomatic pertussis case<\/a>. Consider this further evidence that COVID-19 is definitely not \u201cjust like the flu.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n