Over 200,000 Residents and Staff in Long-Term Care Facilities Have Died From COVID-19

More than 200,000 long-term care facility (LTCF) residents and staff have died due to COVID since the start of the pandemic (Figure 1). The CDC’s latest update reporting data on nursing home deaths as of January 30^th pushes the reported number of deaths over this bleak milestone. This finding comes at a time when the national surge in cases due to the Omicron variant has started to subside, deaths are rising nationwide, and nursing homes have been working to increase vaccination and booster rates among residents and staff, particularly in light of the new federal rule requiring staff vaccination recently allowed to take effect by the Supreme Court. As of January 16^th, approximately 82% of nursing home staff and 87% of nursing home residents are fully vaccinated.

This death count is based on state and federal data sources. For the period between March 2020 and June 2021, the total number of deaths is based on state-reported data on LTCFs, including nursing homes, assisted living, and group homes, that summed to 187,000 resident and staff deaths. For the subsequent period between July 2021 and January 2022, we incorporated data reported to the federal government by nursing facilities (excluding other types of LTCFs), adding another 14,000 resident and staff deaths to the total. The total number of resident and staff deaths from these two sources, roughly 201,000, is likely an undercount of the true number of resident and staff deaths in LTCFs since it excludes deaths in long-term care settings other than nursing homes after June 30^th, 2021. Additionally, not all states reported data on all types of LTCFs prior to June 2021.

COVID-19 deaths in LTCFs make up at least 23% of all COVID-19 deaths in the US (Figure 1). This share has decreased since the start of the pandemic, when LTCF deaths were nearly half of all deaths nationally. This share has dropped over time for a number of reasons, including high rates of vaccination among residents, rising vaccination rates among staff, an increased emphasis on infection control procedures, declining nursing home occupancy, and the lack of data on deaths in assisted living and LTCFs other than nursing homes in recent months. Despite this drop as a share of total deaths, nursing homes have continued to experience disproportionately high case and death rates in the country during the recent surge. Higher case rates may be attributed to the highly transmissible nature of Omicron and the nature of congregate care settings. Higher death rates may be attributed to the high-risk status of those who reside in nursing homes.

COVID-19 data that includes settings across the care continuum is essential to comprehensively assess the impact of COVID-19 on seniors and people with disabilities. To date, the federal government only requires data on COVID-19 cases, deaths, testing, and vaccinations from Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing facilities. However, there is ample research suggesting that that LTSS users in congregate community based settings outside of nursing homes also face elevated risks of COVID-19 infection due to health conditions and the higher levels of infection transmission in some non-nursing facility congregate settings such as assisted living facilities and group homes. Nearly one million people live in assisted living facilities, a population roughly the size of the nursing home population, but one that lacks comparable data. The data gap for all settings across the care continuum makes it difficult to assess the full impact of the pandemic on seniors and people with disabilities residing outside of nursing homes. Additionally, the federal health care worker vaccine mandate does not apply to all settings across the care continuum, possibly leading to COVID-19 infections with resulting staff shortages in these settings.

Data is not available on the demographics of those who died in long-term care settings, making it difficult to understand the impact of race/ethnicity, age, vaccination status, and other key characteristics on infection severity or likelihood of mortality in LTCFs. While federally available data provides insight into the numbers of cases, deaths, and vaccinations as reported by nursing homes, gaps in data limit the ability to assess the impact more directly among residents and staff, by patient characteristics. Overall, cases and deaths in nursing homes appear to be declining. However, this analysis confirms the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on people living and working in LTCFs and highlights the importance of comprehensive, timely, and accurate data.