New figures capture only a part of the coronavirus deaths linked to nursing homes. The government isn't making facilities report data from before May.
1 / 2WASHINGTON — Three months after the coronavirus began rampaging through U.S. nursing homes, the federal government has released the first nationwide data on the virus' impact on long-term care facilities, showing nearly 26,000 resident deaths and 449 staff deaths to date.
The Trump administration acknowledged the steep toll the virus has had on nursing homes, with more than 60,000 coronavirus cases among nursing home residents and nearly 35,000 cases among staff members in the facilities that reported data. "This data, and anecdotal reports across the country, clearly show that nursing homes have been devastated by the virus," Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Seema Verma, administrator of the CMS, wrote in a letter to governors.Story continuesThe newly released data include responses from about 12,500 nursing homes, representing 80 percent of the total number of facilities, the CMS said.
Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the Special Committee on Aging, said in a statement:"The Trump administration has failed the more than 40,000 Americans in long-term care settings who have lost their lives to COVID-19. The families who lost a loved one prior to May 1 deserve a basic level of respect and their loved ones should be counted."
"The Trump administration is taking consistent action to protect the vulnerable," Verma said, adding that"many nursing homes have performed well and demonstrated that it's entirely possible to keep nursing home patients safe." The CDC has periodically asked states to pass on the data they have collected on nursing home deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. But the federal government has never formally asked states to submit the data, and only some of them did, state officials told NBC News.
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