1/4 Covid Deaths Are in Nursing Homes

1/4 Covid Deaths Are in Nursing Homes(wsj.com)

35 points by frlnBorg 5 years ago | 13 comments

The United States needs to take a long, hard look at the current culture of dumping the elderly into a nursing home. From what I understand, there are many cultures that instead take in the elderly into their own homes or try to keep them in their own home. I remember reading a good book on the subject, _Being Mortal_ by Dr. Gawande, a few years back. It was an eye-opener to the realities of how we treat end-of-life care in the U.S.

glofish 5 years ago | |

not sure why you think this is a US problem, in other countries these ratios are even higher

it is a developed world problem

simply put the way people live/work is not suited to multi-generational families - I wish it were

ianai 5 years ago | | |

Agreed. Blaming one another isn’t constructive. Framing it as a needed cultural change goes further.

rowanG077 5 years ago | |

I'm not sure this is feasable. Assuming a family where both adults work it doesn't really seem possiblee to handle this. In the worst case you will have 4 elderly people to handle. You also have to take into account that modern medicine extends the time these elderly people need care significantly.

battery423 5 years ago | |

So you are saying i have to take care of my parents?

Why?

nikolay 5 years ago | |

I think it's much worse in Europe.

awillen 5 years ago |

I don't think nursing homes are as terrible as they're made out to be, at least not as a general concept. The issue, in my view, is much like the issue with private prisons - you have a highly vulnerable population with little recourse against the people in charge, because those people have so much control over residents' lives.

There should be much greater regulation along with frequent inspections and a mandate that residents have information in their rooms about how to report issues directly to the government.

Those things obviously wouldn't help with the coronavirus issues at present, but having that type of government infrastructure involved with nursing homes would have put a lot of pieces in place to allow for a more consistent and coherent response when we started seeing Covid cases.

Of course we also needed PPE and testing en masse at nursing homes early on, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

duckMuppet 5 years ago | |

There already is "greater regulation"..

In fact in NY the nursing homes themselves pleaded with the governor to not force the return of these COVID positive individuals back to the nursing homes. The governor of NY actually scrubbed his order from the state website sending these infected patients from hospitals back to nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

You can use whatever asinine ideas You like to protect your stance on big government. Not enough government wasn't the problem here, the government was essentially sending smallpox blankets into these at risk communities. If those people voted blue or were one of the protected classes, the access media would be all over this.

dnautics 5 years ago | |

"you have a highly vulnerable population with little recourse against the people in charge, because those people have so much control over residents' lives."

Isn't this also true for non-private prisons?

taeric 5 years ago |

This actually sounds low, from the other sources I was seeing. At one point, I could have sworn it was about half.

At any rate, this is shocking in how skewed it is. Not clear what the takeaway is. That we need a better story for an immunity later between at risk groups?

I'm still not sure, either, how this squares with the current mask story. Nursing homes bad at cleaning and isolation of sick individuals? Feels off. But not shockingly so. Regardless, hard to see how people in a mask at the grocery are somehow preventing people in long term care from getting it, at large.

Edit:. I say all of that as someone that is wearing a mask nowadays.

duckMuppet 5 years ago | |

I think it's close to around 44% by recent numbers.

However, NY recently revised how they are counting these deaths, and they now count them in a way where if the nursing home resident is transferred to the hospital, they are generally not counted as a nursing home death. Up until very recently, they were counting that as a nursing home death the same as every other state in the union.

They've been the only state to make such changes so far, but the governor did make a deal with the nursing homes to limit their liability during this situation as well so this is pretty much par for the course here.

mynegation 5 years ago |

This number is for USA. For Canada (as of 7th of May) 82% of deaths have been in long term care [1]

[1] https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/05/07/82-of-ca...

lsllc 5 years ago |

Here's another article (May 26th) with stats as of May 22th that claims 42% of C19 deaths are from assisted living:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...

In a number of states its a much higher percentage.