Nursing homes outpace U.S. in COVID declines

Throughout the pandemic, there has been perhaps nowhere more dangerous than a nursing home. The coronavirus has raced through some 31,000 long-term care facilities in the United States, killing more than 163,000 residents and employees and accounting for more than onethird of all virus deaths since the late spring.

But for the first time since the U.S. outbreak began roughly a year ago — at a nursing care center in Kirkland, Wash. — the threat inside nursing homes may have finally reached a turning point.

Since the arrival of vaccines, which were prioritized to long-term care facilities starting in late December, new cases and deaths in nursing homes, a large subset of longterm care facilities, have fallen steeply, outpacing national declines, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data. The turnaround is an encouraging sign for vaccine effectiveness and offers a glimpse at what may be in store for the rest of the country as more people get vaccinated.

From late December to early February, new cases among nursing home residents fell by more than 80 percent, nearly double the rate of improvement in the general population. The trendline for deaths was even more striking: Even as fatalities spiked overall this winter, deaths inside the facilities have fallen, decreasing by more than 65 percent.

“I’m almost at a loss for words at how amazing it is and how exciting,” said Dr. David Gifford, chief medical officer for the American Health Care Association, which represents thousands of longterm care facilities across the country.

Experts attribute the improvements in large part to the distribution of vaccines. About 4.5 million residents and employees in long-term care facilities have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including about 2.1 million who have been fully vaccinated.

Other factors, including the steep drop in new infections nationwide in recent weeks, may have contributed as well.

Today, new cases in U.S. nursing homes are at their lowest point since May, when the federal government began tracking such data.

“What is certainly surprising to me is how quickly we’re seeing this,” said Dr. Sunil Parikh, an associate professor of public health research and medicine at Yale School of Public Health in Connecticut, where weekly cases in nursing homes had dropped from several hundred around the holidays to as little as 30 statewide during one recent week.

“It’s a dramatic decline,” he said, adding that more research was needed to determine what role community transmission played.