Survey: Maryland Scores No. 6 on Health Care During the Pandemic

This story is reprinted from the Pew Charitable Trust initiative, Stateline.

Hawaii and the main medical system perform best in all states during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new rankings that take into account factors such as vaccination rates, hospital and intensive care unit capacity, and mortality. Was shown.

Alabama was ranked last on the scorecard, followed by Oklahoma, Kentucky, Mississippi and Georgia.

Maryland went to work at number 6.

The rankings released last week were compiled by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that promotes health fairness and higher quality, efficiency and access to health care. Each year, the Commonwealth uses dozens of means to create a ranking of the state’s health system. This year, we have added a category specific to how the state healthcare system worked with COVID-19 from February 2020 to the end of March 2022. Vermont, Washington and Oregon conclude the top five.

In general, states that were judged to have a strong healthcare system overall were also ranked high in COVID-19 performance. The opposite was true for those with low scores in the overall healthcare ranking.

How quickly the state launched its attacks after the vaccine was first made available at the end of 2020 was one of the federal tools used to assess the state’s COVID-19 response.

Vermont moved fastest, followed by Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine. Within 200 days of the availability of the vaccine, they were able to fully vaccinate 70% of the population over the age of 12 (usually meaning two doses).

By the end of March 2022, 21 states had not yet reached 70%. Alabama, Mississippi and Wyoming were less than 60%.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended boosters, but less than 40% of adults in the United States have boosters by the end of March, and the percentage varies considerably from state to state.

More than half of adults have a booster effect in Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont. In contrast, even a quarter of adults in Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina did not receive booster shots.

Another indicator that federal analysts focused on was how the hospital system was stressed during the pandemic. The report stated that between August 2020 and March 2022, the country experienced 4.6 million COVID-19-related hospitalizations. To determine how tight the healthcare system was, analysts measured the number of days during which at least 80% of the beds in each state’s intensive care unit were occupied.

They found that 16 states and the District of Columbia operated ICUs with more than 80% capacity for at least 150 days. Texas and Alabama were above that percentage for 566 and 517 days, respectively. Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island each had more than 300 days, more than 80%.

Another indicator that the Commonwealth used in its ranking was the “excessive” deaths experienced by each state during the pandemic. According to the analysis, excessive mortality means mortality above the norm, which may be the result of COVID-19 or the disruption of access to health care caused by a pandemic.

In general, states with a strong overall health system had fewer over-deaths than states with a weak system.

Mortality ranged from a minimum of 110 per 100,000 in Hawaii to a maximum of 596 per 100,000 in Mississippi.

Nationally, analysis shows that premature deaths from treatable conditions such as heart disease and diabetes increased from 83.8 to 89.8 per 100,000 inhabitants between 2019 and 2020. The most notable increases were in the Midwest and South.

The good news in the report was that the proportion of people with health insurance was fairly stable across the state during the pandemic, but fell a bit in 2021.

Reasons: Employers have lost less health insurance than expected, health insurance reform safety net clauses help those who have lost insurance, and Pandemic’s early parliamentary actions have people enrolled in Medicade. Continued to increase subsidies during the pandemic to help people pay for private health insurance plans.

Some of these provisions may expire when a country’s public health emergency is finally lifted, and the number of people with health insurance may drop sharply.

State Health System Performance at COVID-19

Source: Commonwealth Fund