Via The Washington Post: The Health 202: Protecting U.S. nursing homes would have significantly slashed coronavirus deaths. Excerpt:
The full picture of the coronavirus’s toll on U.S. nursing homes is finally becoming clear.
It is enormous.
Data updated yesterday by the federal government now show that nearly 32,000 American nursing home residents have died of the virus — a figure certain to grow, with 12 percent of all facilities yet to report their totals. Nearly 700 nursing home employees have also died. As of Thursday, more than 106,000 Americans overall had died of the disease.
It may turn out that as many as 4 in 10 covid-19 deaths occurred among nursing home residents.
“We have failed the residents and we have failed the staff as a society,” Michael Wasserman, president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine, told The Post’s Peter Whoriskey, Debbie Cenziper and Will Englund.
For the first few months of the pandemic, information about nursing home cases and deaths was murky. Several dozen states refused to make the information public, leading to lawsuits across the country. On April 30, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services stepped in with a rule requiring nursing facilities to report information not only on cases and deaths, but also equipment and staffing shortages.
The agency released an initial trough of information on Monday, showing that about 25,000 residents had died. Yesterday’s update not only upped the death count but also provided a better window into the supply shortages many facilities faced as they tried to contain outbreaks and isolate infected patients.
“We wanted to be as transparent as possible with the American people,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma told reporters.
Hundreds of facilities reported shortages in nursing staff and supplies.
Nearly 2,000 facilities reported insufficient nursing staff and more than 2,200 said they lack enough surgical aides, according to a database created by CMS. More than 500 said they don’t have any N95 masks, and more than 250 said they don’t have any masks at all.
“The data released Thursday covers nearly 9 in 10 of the country’s 15,000 federally certified nursing homes,” my colleagues report. “It does not include assisted-living centers and other types of elder-care facilities that are not certified by CMS.”
