What is Long Covid? Current Understanding About Risks, Symptoms and Recovery

Washington Post | By Allyson Chiu

The condition known as long covid continues to frustrate its sufferers, baffle scientists and alarm people who are concerned about being infected by the coronavirus. The term, a widely used catchall phrase for persistent symptoms that can range from mild to debilitating and last for weeks, months or longer, is technically known as Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or PASC. But scientists say much remains unknown about long covid, which is also referred to colloquially as “long-haul covid,” “long-term covid,” “post-covid conditions” and “post-covid syndrome,” among other names.

“This is a condition that we don’t even have an agreed upon name for yet, and we don’t have any understanding really of what’s going on down at a chemical level,” said Greg Vanichkachorn, medical director of Mayo Clinic’s COVID-19 Activity Rehabilitation Program. “So, until we have that kind of understanding, it’s really important that we not make quick decisions about what long covid can or can’t be.”

Read more @ Washington Post

CDC Peels Off Mask Recommendations for Most U.S. Counties

MedPage Today | By Molly Walker

After much speculation, CDC unveiled its new criteria on Friday [February 25, 2022] for masking throughout communities based on healthcare indicators, where only 30% of the country would currently be recommended to wear a mask.

These metrics are a combination of new hospital admissions, hospital bed utilization for COVID patients, as well as incidence of cases in a community, combined to indicate either a low risk (green), medium risk (yellow), or high risk (orange) of severe disease in a particular county.

By the most current CDC data, this means that only 28.2% of the population lives in a high-risk county, though 37.3% of U.S. counties would be classified as high-risk. About 40% of counties are classified as medium risk (containing 42% of the nation's population), while 23% are classified as low risk (29.5% of the population).

Read more @ MedPage Today

Ask Congress to Extend the Hospice Face-to-Face (F2F) Telehealth Flexibility

NAHC has started a grassroots advocacy campaign asking Congress to extend the COVID-related flexibility that is allowing hospices to perform the required face-to-face (F2F) eligibility recertification visit using telehealth. See the campaign and reach out to your members of congress to ask them to extend this flexibility here: https://p2a.co/vto2u7C.

Advocates are needed to weigh-in on this issue before this Friday, March 11, which is when the current government stopgap funding expires. A large, omnibus spending bill is expected to pass congress before then – this bill is the main legislative vehicle that we’d like to see a F2F telehealth extension included in. While an extension of other pandemic telehealth flexibilities is being considered for this bill, unfortunately the hospice F2F is not currently planned for inclusion. We need advocates to tell their elected officials how valuable this flexibility has been and that it should be extended beyond the end of the PHE.

Also – if you have any stories, anecdotes, or personal reflections on how the allowance to use telehealth for the F2F has benefited patients, families, and providers during the pandemic, and how you would continue to use it post-COVID, please send those to Davis Baird at [email protected]. Key congressional staff are open to hearing stories from the field about its utility, so please share.

Medicare Advantage Benefits in 2022 Target Home as a Setting, Diabetes as a Condition

Home Health Care News

Medicare Advantage (MA) supplemental benefits adoption has been slow by some measures and rapid by others. 

A new report from the consulting firm Milliman offers a look into that dynamic and shows exactly where each of those benefits stands in 2022.

Among the primarily-health related benefits, in-home support services (IHSS) remains the most popular benefit by a large margin. Meanwhile, adult day service offerings have actually fallen off from 2021.

As for the Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill (SSBCI), the services that home care agencies can provide also remain the most popular. Those include the food and produce, meals beyond a limited basis, non-medical transportation and general supports for living offerings.

IHSS can be offered through both the primarily-health related and SSBCI pathways. The benefit has seen significant uptick over the last couple years. Now, 544 plans are offering it, a 268% increase from the 148 plans that offered IHSS in 2020.

“That’s really significant growth from when this was first available as a benefit,” Tyler Cromer, a principal for ATI Advisory, told Home Health Care News when initial MA benefits data for 2022 was first released. “There’s a lot of good news here for home care providers.”

As for adult day services, it’s drop in popularity among plans could be due to a few reasons. In 2021, 88 plans offered the benefit, up from 63 in 2020. But in 2022, just 42 plans are on board with the benefit.

Adult day services were hit hard by COVID-19 over the past two years. For long periods of time, operators in a lot of states were not even allowed to open and struggled to stay afloat.

Additionally, because MA plans are still experimenting with supplemental benefits, the amount of hours they pay for – for any given service – is sometimes meager. With that in mind, the benefit may not be worth it right now for either side – provider or MA plan.

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