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More than 1300 nursing home residents died from COVID-19 in a four-week period ending Jan. 22, according to new AARP research of federal data. The death toll represents the death rate since the rise of the omicron variant last winter. This is also very likely to be the third year in a row that deaths peak in winter.
As deaths increased, only a portion of nursing home citizens and less than a quarter of fitness staff were up-to-date on their COVID-19 vaccinations. That left about 600,000 nursing home citizens and 1. 6 million employees shot as of Jan. 22.
AARP’s findings are “pretty discouraging,” says Priya Chidambaram, senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which also tracks COVID-19 in nursing homes. “With very low vaccination rates and very high mortality rates, we conclude that higher vaccination rates and booster rates have prevented some of those deaths. “
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Vaccination rates in nursing homes have been lagging for months. Bivalent boosters, designed to protect against omicron subvariants and earlier strains, became available since the fall, but the percentage of citizens updated with vaccines increased through just 11 percent emissions nationally, to 51%, between mid-October 2022 and mid-January 2023.
During the same period, the updated nursing home staffing rate dropped by 3 percentage issues nationally, to 22%.
Residents and staff are “up to date” once they have gained the bivalent booster, or if they have finished their number one vaccination series or gained some other booster in the two months since.
“The downward trend in vaccination is concerning,” says Jennifer Schrack, an associate professor in the department of epidemiology of aging at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “People are tired of COVID. It needs to get back to normal. This is ironic because vaccination is probably the most productive way for us to return to a state of normalcy.
Once again, AARP research revealed a large variation in state vaccination rates. Arizona had the fewest citizens, just 32 percent, a day with shooting, while South Dakota had the fewest people, at 78 percent. California continued to lead with up-to-staff numbers updated, yet less than a portion (44%) of all staff achieved this status. Tennessee reported the lowest percentage of updated staff, at just 10%.
While it’s still too early to be sure, deaths will most likely have peaked this winter, according to Ari Houser, AARP’s senior strategy adviser and co-author of the research. Weekly knowledge shows that the highest mortality rate among citizens occurred in the first week. of January, before decreasing each one next week. Two weeks of more recent data from nursing homes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also show that cases and deaths since Jan. 22 have dropped by about one-third of AARP’s investigation period rates.
“There may be another buildup later in the season,” Houser says, “but I guess we’ve noticed our peak winter waves over the last month. “
While a spike in winter mortality follows beyond virus patterns, this time the peak appears to be much lower than in subsequent winters. comparison with that era of reports. And beyond winter, when COVID-19 vaccines were just beginning to become available and the virus was at its highest, the number of deaths was about 15 times higher: more than 20,000 deaths in just 4 weeks.
Even so, 1300 resident deaths in a month is too much, according to R. Tamara Konetzka, professor of exercise science at the University of Chicago. There should be no more than a thousand nursing home deaths consistent with a month as a new normal,” he says. “We have equipment to decrease that number. “
Nursing home experts and citizen advocates are calling for more efforts to help nursing home populations. “Unfortunately, much of the politics that focuses on nursing homes that emerged early in the pandemic has faded,” Konetzka says. By claiming that the pandemic is over, we are leaving nursing home citizens vulnerable. “
The federal government contracted CVS, Walgreens, and a few other pharmacies to house on-site vaccination clinics in most nursing homes across the country in late 2020 and early 2021, and efforts have been successful in offering citizens their first COVID-19 circular. 19. Blow quickly. A federal mandate requiring nearly all nursing home staff participating in Medicare and/or Medicaid to be vaccinated with a number one series, starting in early 2022, has also contributed greatly to adoption. Vaccination rates for citizens have reached nearly 90 percent, with many states well above that rate, according to AARP analysis.
But a crusade of this magnitude was not prepared for the upcoming shooting. In addition, there is no component of the federal vaccine mandate that requires staff to remain informed about vaccines. While some states have issued their own withdrawal orders for staff or helped coordinate the management of clinics. , most haven’t, leaving the comforts to fend for themselves. Many operators reported high rates of vaccine reluctance, lack of knowledge or confusion about bivalent boosters, lack of vaccine staff, and pandemic fatigue in their communities.
In late December, AARP wrote to the Centers for Medicare.
CMS said in early January that on-site vaccination clinics for citizens were underway across the country and that the company and its partners were trying to reach out to nursing homes to offer assistance, education and support.
“In fact, we expect you to settle for those donations for those groups,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said on a call with nursing home stakeholders. “Getting the updated vaccine is the most important tool we have to save you from severe illness, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. And nursing home residents, who are sensitive to the dire consequences of the virus, deserve the highest point of coverage we can offer. “
More than 180,000 citizens and nursing home staff have died from the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting for about one-sixth of the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the country.
AARP’s analysis, conducted through the AARP Public Policy Institute and the Scripps Center for Gerontology at the University of Miami in Ohio, is primarily based on knowledge from the public COVID-19 nursing home archive through Medicare Centers.
Ongoing research only captures knowledge of nursing homes participating in Medicare and/or Medicaid, not all long-term care services, such as assisted living, independent living, memory care, and others, as some other counts do. It will be published next month when new federal knowledge becomes available. Learn more about analytics.
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