The New York Times recently reported that 43% of the coronavirus deaths in the United States are from nursing homes and long-term care centers. As of June 26, 54,000 residents and workers have died from these centers with more than 282,000 infections in 12,000 facilities.
Early during the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have ruled out that senior citizens are amongst the group most vulnerable to the virus. It is not just their age that caused the rapid spread of the disease in homes but also the confined environment as workers move from room to room.
Earlier this month, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London released a study to determine why older citizens are so vulnerable to the virus. With stories of many senior citizens dying versus a few being able to recover, they found factors determining how some older individuals had stronger immune systems than others.
More Than Old Age
George Kuchel, a geriatrician and gerontologist at the University of Connecticut, said, 'It is not chronological age alone that determines how one does in the face of a life-threatening infection such as Covid-19. Having multiple chronic diseases and frailty is in many ways as or more important than chronological age. An 80-year-old who is otherwise healthy and not frail might be more resilient in fighting off infection than a 60-year-old with many chronic conditions.'
In their study, they analyzed 70,117 cases from mainland China, seeing that the fatality rate among positive cases was at 1.38%. One of the countries that suffered a great loss in older citizens contracting the virus had been Italy, where 23% of its people are 65 years old and older.
38% of Italian cases had been people aged 70 and older, compared to only 12% in China. Janko Nikolich-Zugich, an immunobiologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine said, 'Older people are not as good at reacting to microorganisms they haven't encountered before.
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Death Rates
While 11% of all coronavirus cases came from nursing homes in America, they have accounted for up to 43% of deaths in the whole country with New Hampshire at an 80% rate. The following states with a 73% to 77% rate of deaths connected to long-term facilities are Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
In New York, they've had over 31,000 deaths as of June 27 with 6,250 deaths from nursing homes. Senate Finance Committee Chairwoman Liz Krueger said 'I don't know if we've gotten a full and correct accounting of how many people died of COVID-19 in nursing homes and how many nursing residents transferred to hospitals died of COVID.'
From March 25 to May 10, Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a directive for more than 4,300 COVID-19-positive senior citizens to be transferred from hospitals to nursing homes in New York. It is suspected that this resulted in more than 5,800 deaths in these facilities. They were moved to free up space in hospitals as New York became the top epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.
