Nearly half of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States have occurred among nursing home residents, whose age, chronic medical conditions, and congregate living quarters place them and their caregivers at high risk of contracting the disease.
Nearly half of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States have occurred among nursing home residents, whose age, chronic medical conditions, and congregate living quarters place them and their caregivers at high risk of contracting the disease.
And yet, six months into the pandemic, more than 20 percent of nursing homes in the US continue to report severe shortages of staff and personal protective equipment (PPE), according to a new study.
“Twenty percent is a lot, given where we are in the course of this pandemic. I would have hoped by month six we would be close to zero percent,” says Brian E. McGarry, Ph.D., assistant professor of Geriatrics/Aging and Public Health Sciences at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). He is lead author of a paper released as a fast track ahead of print article by the journal Health Affairs. “While there has been some shifting in which nursing homes have been reporting these problems, from a national level, we’re still not on the right trajectory.”
The study, conducted in collaboration with David C. Grabowski, Ph.D., professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, and Michael L. Barnett, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is among the first to report results from a new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) COVID-19 Nursing Home Database.
Read more at University of Rochester
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