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Jamie Azar left a rehab hospital in Tennessee this week with the help of a walker after spending the entire month of August in the ICU and on a ventilator. She had received a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in mid-July but tested positive for the coronavirus within 11 days and nearly died. Now Azar, who earns about $36,000 a year as the director of a preschool at a Baptist church in Georgia, is facing thousands of dollars in medical expenses that she can’t afford. (Rowland, 9/18)

New York City's public hospital system will receive additional government support for the expenses it accrued during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following pressure from New York lawmakers and health system officials, the Federal Emergency Management Agency agreed to cover almost all of the hospitals' excess costs from that period of the pandemic, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said during a news conference Wednesday. In October 2020, NYC Health + Hospitals submitted a reimbursement request to FEMA, asking for about $900 million to offset expenses related to hiring extra staff and expanding bed capacity to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients. (Devereaux, 9/17)

Vaccine-resistant Americans are turning to the treatment with a zeal that has, at times, mystified their doctors, chasing down lengthy infusions after rejecting vaccines that cost one-hundredth as much. Orders have exploded so quickly this summer — to 168,000 doses per week in late August, up from 27,000 in July — that the Biden administration warned states this week of a dwindling national supply. (Mueller, 9/18)

State officials across the country are sounding the alarm over shortages of monoclonal antibody drugs used for the treatment of COVID-19, with some warning unvaccinated folks not to count on having such treatments available in the instance that they contract the virus in the near future. With demand far outpacing supply for the drugs, namely Regeneron's REVG-COV and Eli Lilley's Bamlanivimab, the Biden administration announced this week that the Department of Health and Human Services would be "transitioned from a direct ordering process to a state/territory-coordinated distribution system" for the treatments. The agency promising the switch would give "health departments maximum flexibility to get these critical drugs where they are needed most." (Dumas, 9/18)

A day after Gov. Ron DeSantis pledged to “fight like hell” to maintain Florida’s supply of monoclonal antibody treatments for people with COVID-19, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried asked President Joe Biden to hold off on changing Florida’s allotment of the therapeutics. Fried, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2022, asked for planned changes to the national distribution of antibody drugs to be delayed until the COVID-19 caseload is “further reduced” in Florida. (9/19)

A horse tranquilizer drug often found mixed with opioids is increasingly involved in overdose deaths in some U.S. states. The drug, called xylazine, is a sedative used in veterinary medicine, and it is not approved for use in humans. Recently, the tranquilizer began popping up in the U.S. illegal drug supply, frequently in combination with heroin or fentanyl (both types of opioids), a mixture sometimes referred to as "tranq dope," Live Science previously reported. (Rettner, 9/18)

Equine ivermectin comes in small tubes and syringes and helps eliminate “many types of worms,” often for less than $10. And lately it’s been hard to find. Amid the recent clamor for the deworming agent — commonly used on horses, livestock and sometimes dogs and cats — as an unproven covid-19 treatment for humans, people who need to treat their horses with the substance have been faced with empty shelves and the fear that they could be mistaken for the people who are using the drug on themselves. (Pietsch, 9/19)

With the spread of the Delta variant and lagging vaccination rates, Covid-19 cases have strained many hospitals across the US -- which one expert called unfair and unacceptable. Montana's health care system is under that strain, including St. Peter's Health in Helena, which is operating under crisis standards of care. "We are at the point where not every patient in need will get the care we might wish we could give. It is not business as usual at your local health care system," Dr. Shelly Harkins, chief medical officer of St. Peter's Health, said. (Holcombe, 9/20)

Now people in the state’s medical community say they’re watching a sophisticated hospital system stumble under low staffing levels and a crush of COVID-19 patients spurred by the highly infectious delta variant. Young pregnant women so sick with the virus they need a ventilator to breathe. People experiencing chest pain, a major heart attack symptom, waiting for hours in the ER. Gravely ill patients dying before they get care — or because someone else with better survival odds was prioritized for treatment. Alaska is experiencing one of the sharpest surges of COVID-19 in the United States, with more people hospitalized with COVID-19 than at any other time during the pandemic and vaccination rates in the nation’s bottom third. (Hollander, 9/17)

Every breath Robby Walker takes is one that almost didn't happen. Just a few weeks ago, the Florida father of six was on a ventilator with Covid-19 pneumonia in both lungs. Like most Americans hospitalized with Covid-19, Walker was not vaccinated. "He is in dire need of an ECMO treatment, which is not available at the hospital that he is in," his wife Susan Walker told CNN in August. ECMO treatment uses an external machine that can function as the body's heart and lungs. It can be used for organ transplant patients, victims of severe heart attacks and seriously ill Covid-19 patients -- including young adults. (Yan, 9/19)

Can a young man with Covid-19 pneumonia in the emergency department of an Oklahoma hospital have an effect on an elderly woman with chest pain in Connecticut? An early-morning call from the head of my Connecticut hospital makes me think he can, and this butterfly effect is something many hospitals will be experiencing in the weeks and months ahead as Covid-19 and the Delta variant continue to surge throughout parts of the U.S. (Dutta, 9/20)