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What your doctor is reading on Medscape.com:
APRIL 27, 2020 — Here are the coronavirus stories Medscape’s editors around the globe think you need to know about today:
Doc’s Hospital Privileges Suspended
A private-practice obstetrician in southern California was forced to leave a laboring patient abruptly when the hospital suspended her privileges and barred her from campus, she says. The physician had been trying to get the hospital to address what she believed to be inadequate policies on personal protective equipment when, fed up by their inaction, she filmed and posted to Facebook a video of hospital workers lined up close together for free acai bowls, seemingly unobservant of social distancing guidelines.
“I think administrators trained them poorly and downplayed the risk of COVID so that people wouldn’t demand protection, wouldn’t ask for masks,” the physician said. She is pursuing legal action against the hospital.
CMS Suspends Advance Medicare Pay Program
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Sunday that it will suspend its Medicare Advance Payment Program for clinicians and not accept any new applications. The agency also said it will reevaluate all pending and new hospital applications for Accelerated Payments by taking into account recent payments through the Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Provider Relief Fund.
Seniors Show Unusual Symptoms
Older adults with COVID-19 may not have the disease’s typical symptoms of fever, an insistent cough, or shortness of breath, Kaiser Health News reports. Rather, seniors may seem not to be acting like themselves, sleep more than usual, stop eating or speaking, seem unusually apathetic or confused, lose orientation to their surroundings, or become dizzy and fall.
“With a lot of conditions, older adults don’t present in a typical way, and we’re seeing that with COVID-19 as well,” said a geriatrician.
Health Disparities
The pattern of minority health disparities in COVID-19 is “irrefutable,” wrote Clyde W. Yancy, MD, of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, in a viewpoint article published earlier this month. Blacks in the United States are being infected with SARS-CoV-2 and are dying of COVID-19 at higher rates than whites, early data show.
