(Really) caring about long-term care could help slash COVID-19 deaths by 60%.
Providing “extraordinary resources” to protect people in nursing homes and assisted living from the coronavirus could reduce COVID-19 deaths by as much as 60% in states and around the world, according to a May 1 article in The Hill.
“This simple fact, however, has been tragically ignored,” write Karl Pillemer, director of the Cornell University Institute for Translational Research on Aging, and Mark S. Lachs, president of the American Federation for Aging Research
Nursing home and assisted living residents make up less than 1% of the U.S. adult population, but they constitute at least 40% of COVID-19 deaths in many states, the authors report. Two-thirds or more of all deaths in Colorado, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire are among residents of long-term care settings.
Strategies to battle the coronavirus to date have focused on personal distancing, increasing critical care capacity, antibody testing, and enhanced surveillance measures. But these measures have minimal effect on long-term care residents, the authors maintain.
Instead, Pillemer and Lachs suggest that policy makers and providers focus squarely on developing robust prevention and safety plans that call for:
- Greatly exceeding current funding for nursing homes and assisted living to achieve real protection for their residents and care workers.
- Convening a national task force focused on ramping up existing efforts and generating innovative solutions.
- Making personal protective equipment available universally to long-term care staff.
- Creating specialized care sites, away from uninfected residents, for those under treatment for, or recuperating from, COVID-19.
- Initiating and evaluating creative approaches to keeping staff free from infections.
- Providing substantial financial incentives to encourage staff to self-isolate for rotating periods of time.
- Deploying extensive testing resources to nursing homes and assisted living settings.
“These options may have seemed implausible three months ago,” the authors conclude. “However, given both the enormous human and financial costs of doing nothing, a major investment in protecting the most vulnerable older adults is not only justified, but absolutely essential.”