FRIDAY, Sept. 10, 2021 (HealthDay News) – The number of COVID-19 deaths and deaths in nursing homes in the United States appears to have been greatly underestimated.
According to a new study, this is because US federal guidelines do not require nursing homes to report cases and deaths until May 24, 2020, months after the start of the pandemic.
“Due to the slowdown in the federal system for reporting cases and deaths in nursing homes, there were about 68,000 unreported cases and 16,000 unreported deaths from COVID-19 in the first months of the pandemic,” said lead researcher Karen Shen, an applied public. and a labor economist at Harvard University.
“Reporting underreporting changes the understanding of nursing home fees in different places and in different facilities,” she added.
For example, the use of reported figures, not taking into account the delay, suggests a similar number of nursing home residents who died in New York (5,776) and California (5,622), or about 5 deaths per 100 beds in both states, he said. Shen.
However, after the unreported deaths were reported, the numbers changed dramatically, she said.
“We estimate that nursing homes in New York have suffered 9,276 deaths [8 deaths per 100 beds]compared to 6487 in California [5.5 deaths per 100 beds]Said Shen.
The delay in federal reporting has significantly affected the number of nursing homes, and Shen said the data should not be used without some qualification or correction.
“We also hope that in future situations there will be faster and clearer efforts to collect data that would avoid some of the confusion that has arisen during this pandemic,” she added.
For the new study, Shen and colleagues compared COVID cases and deaths reported to the U.S. National Health Safety Network (NHSN) and state health departments until May 31, 2020.
The sample includes numbers for 20 states and nearly 12,000 nursing homes. Researchers have expanded this data to include more than 15,000 nursing homes across the country.
On average, 44% of COVID cases and 40% of deaths were reported to public health agencies but not to the NHSN, the study found.