With COVID-19 cases rising in Illinois and nationwide, it is critical that patients can access treatment to keep them from becoming sicker when symptoms call for it. However, federal bureaucracies require pharmacies to jump through burdensome hoops to request and access COVID-19 therapeutics.
Throughout the pandemic, urgent care was critical in helping communities protect themselves, developing systems to help people get tested efficiently. In 2020, urgent care clinics saw a 58% increase in visits due to the demand for COVID-19 care, including helping patients get treatment to manage symptoms.
Among these treatments are antiviral therapies that lower the risk of long COVID and more severe symptoms. Studies show that one such treatment decreased the risk of death by 47% and the risk of hospitalization by 24% over six months. But challenges hinder the ability of pharmacists in independent and community settings to get treatments to patients who need them.
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Nationwide, only 61% of pharmacies stock one or more COVID-19 treatments. In Illinois, only 66.6% of more than 2,100 pharmacies currently stock at least one treatment for COVID-19. For urgent care providers to help patients efficiently, they need assurance that pharmacies can provide these treatments.
Independent and community pharmacies and other providers rely on a laborious system to request and order government-procured COVID-19 therapeutics.
The Health Partner Order Portal is managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and community-based pharmacies often lack the resources to navigate the portal’s burdensome requirements to request antiviral therapies to protect their patients.
Ultimately, this means that providers, including those in urgent care clinics, cannot be certain the treatments they prescribe are reaching the patients who need them. Delayed treatment could potentially mean the difference between experiencing mild symptoms of COVID-19 and hospitalization.
To ensure these medicines are reaching the hands of the right patients at the right time and stem the tide of COVID-19, the Biden administration must alleviate the administrative burden on independent and community-based health care providers.
Dr. Benjamin Barlow, MD, chief medical officer, Experity Health
Former chief medical officer, American Family Care, and member, White House Medical Unit
Why renewable energy projects stall
Your Oct. 2 editorial about the PJM planning queue is simply inaccurate, PJM believes (“Why wait? Get renewable energy projects connected to the power grid”).
As you acknowledge, PJM is currently implementing a new, reformed interconnection process that was overwhelmingly approved by stakeholders and approved by FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The transition period alone will study more than 250,000 MW worth of generation projects for integration into the PJM grid over the next three years. More than 97% of these projects are solar, wind, storage or hybrid solar-storage combinations.
A major contributor to the backlog PJM is dealing with results from developers submitting multiple, speculative projects to the queue. Our new process is already weeding out a significant number of these queue-cloggers.
In evaluating more than 700 projects under consideration for our new, accelerated “Fast-Lane” category, we have already seen 112 projects drop out as of last week because they declined to post basic readiness requirements intended to separate real projects from speculative ones.
Most concerning at this point are hurdles to project development we are seeing that have nothing to do with PJM. Today, there are about 43,000 MW of projects that have completed PJM’s study process and should be moving to construction but are not because of issues related to local siting and supply chain backlogs for equipment.
PJM is working with all 13 states in its footprint as well as the District of Columbia to facilitate their policy goals.
Susan Buehler, chief communications officer, PJM
Electric ranges are a pain
We had an electric range and have friends with an electric range. They, and we, do not like them. They are difficult to operate (“Go electric in new Chicago buildings, and nix gas stoves and heat” — Oct. 3).
There are other gas-driven pieces of equipment such as power mowers, snow blowers, leaf blowers and edgers that hurt the environment.
Jerry Guth, Carol Stream
Crime causes ‘crisis’ for arts scene
Regarding Stefano Esposito’s article on the post-pandemic crisis about our city’s cultural arts, I’m not sure he and many of your reporters really get what’s going on (“Post-pandemic ‘crisis’ in Chicago’s cultural arts scene is real, new report finds” — Oct. 2).
Chicago is in the middle of a “crime pandemic” in the central city. Most people do not want to travel downtown to support our wonderful theater groups, restaurants, clubs and other cultural venues because of the threat of frequent and rampant violent crime that is committed daily.
After 37 years of commuting downtown to work on LaSalle Street and enjoying many of the great cultural offerings provided, I have no desire to come to the central city based on the crime threat. Our wonderful city will continue to decline until we can manage to resolve this issue.
Jim McInerney, Willowbrook
