Below you can find the most recent posts on COVID-19 from the PA Budget and Policy Center and Keystone Research Center:
The first, The Likely Impact of COVID-19 on Pennsylvania on Pennsylvania, presents the epidemiological projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in the context of recent data on the spread of COVID-19 in Pennsylvania. The IHME predicts that the peak COVID-19 caseload in PA will occur in the middle of April and that we should have enough hospital beds for all cases, although hospitals around the state will have to struggle to find an additional 438 ICU beds. The study predicts that 3,049 Pennsylvanians will die from COVID-19. These projections assume that the policy of business closures and social distancing remain in place for some time. We show that without those policies, it is likely that far more people would be hospitalized and die in Pennsylvania.
The second, What Not to Do in the Face of a COVID-19 Driven Recession: Lessons from the Corbett Years, makes a preliminary (and uncertain) projection that state revenues will likely drop between $4.5 and $9 billion in the current fiscal year and the next one together. Taken together with added expenditures for Medicaid and other items, the state could face a budget shortfall of between $5 and $9.5 billion even with the higher federal reimbursement rate contained in the Family First Act. And, if the recession is deeper or longer, and the recovery slower, the budget hole could be even deeper. Federal aid already in the pipeline will only give the state about $4 billion. Without more federal aid, the state will face the same choice it did in the Corbett years of either raising taxes or drastically reducing state spending for pre-K, K-12, and higher education; environmental protection; human services; and other purposes. We review the dismal results of the Corbett spending reductions and urge our political leaders not to go down that path again. Instead, if new revenues are needed, we suggest they adopt our Fair Share Tax plan and raise taxes on the richest Pennsylvanians.
On Friday, March 27, our blog post COVID Collapse Likely to Cost Pennsylvania at Least Half a Million Jobs by Summer explained why Pennsylvania is suffering from even greater job loss than many other states.
On Thursday, March 26, our blog post Funds for Pennsylvania in the Senate Coronavirus Relief Act gave a comprehensive accounting of the funds available to the state and to local government from the coronavirus relief legislation or CARES Act
On Wednesday, March 25, our blog post Here Is What We Know About the COVID-19 Stimulus Bill presented a comprehensive list of the major provisions of the CARES Act. We are working on an update that includes details about the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act (CPRSA) and Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFA).
Also on the 25th, we posted Viruses, Health Care, and Communal Provision which argues that the current pandemic confirms a point we have made before: health care is one good that must be provided communally. This pandemic starkly demonstrates something we should have already known—that the health of each of us is depending on the health of all of us and that none of us, no matter how wealthy we are, can protect ourselves against the risks of bad health only through our own effort. We all depend on the communal provision of health care. And given that we do, it is an injustice that some can afford health care when others cannot. That’s why we all have a right to health care.
And near the start of the crisis in Pennsylvania, on March 16, we published a policy brief, The Moral Equivalent of Wartime Equality: Public Policies in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Pennsylvania, which set out a number of critical policies that we believe Pennsylvania should adopt to ensure that the burdens of COVID-19 do not fall unfairly on those who have low incomes, who are Black or brown, who are disabled, on the elderly, or on women. We are pleased—and Governor Wolf and the members of the General Assembly should be proud—that so many of the short-term policies we recommended have been adopted by the state.
In the next week or so we will be writing more about the COVID-19 crisis. In the works: a review of what the state has accomplished so far; a comprehensive look at the federal relief bills; an analysis of what we fear is a growing right-wing opposition to the closure and social distancing policies that are so necessary at this moment; and our thoughts about the nature, likely impact, and how best to rlieve of the coming recession, which is unusual in that it is a product of deliberate policy—not miscalculation or happenstance.
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