from Hacker News

1/4 Covid Deaths Are in Nursing Homes

by frlnBorg on 6/2/20, 7:17 PM with 13 comments

• by cityofdelusion on 6/2/20, 8:46 PM

  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.

• by awillen on 6/2/20, 9:22 PM

  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.

• by taeric on 6/3/20, 1:52 AM

  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.

• by mynegation on 6/2/20, 8:36 PM

  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...

• by lsllc on 6/2/20, 8:42 PM

  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.