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Health officials in some states have started sounding the alarm bells about coronavirus outbreaks among staff and residents of long-term care facilities and nursing homes as the highly contagious delta variant is fueling them. cases in communities across the country.
Covid-19 deaths in long-term care facilities have plunged with vaccine availability, and government data shows 81% of nursing home residents are now fully immunized. But the rise of the delta variant and concerns about the immunization rate of people working at these facilities, which in some southern states is below 50 percent, are worrying experts and epidemic advocates.
While experts said there was no data yet to suggest Covid cases were on the rise in long-term care facilities and nursing homes nationwide, in some places there are Including Mississippi and Indiana, officials said unvaccinated workers were spreading the virus.
The fears come as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the delta is “highly contagious, likely to be more severe” and that, although rare, “breakthrough infections can be as transmissible as unvaccinated cases.”
In Mississippi, the state epidemiologist said Wednesday there were more than 100 outbreaks in long-term care facilities in the state, including 72 in nursing homes.
“The main driver of these nursing home outbreaks are infections among staff and unvaccinated employees,” Dr. Paul Byers said in a video press conference. “Unfortunately, in some cases these infections are spreading among residents and sometimes among fully vaccinated residents. Some of these cases among residents have resulted in serious illness, he said.
“It’s going to be imperative that we continue as healthcare workers and healthcare workers in long-term care facilities to increase our vaccination rates among these workers, which are still below 50% statewide,” and inferior in some establishments, ”he said. noted.
In Indiana, seven residents recently died at an unnamed facility where less than half of the staff were vaccinated, local health officials said earlier this month. Cases have also increased in southern states, including Louisiana and Texas.
The main concern among experts and advocates is the low number of staff vaccinated in some states, particularly in the South, reflecting the challenge of uneven vaccination rates across the country.
Nationally, about 58% of nursing home staff and 81% of nursing home residents have been vaccinated, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But those numbers can vary widely by state, with Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky ranking among the lowest, with less than 50% of staff having finished their vaccinations.
Ari Houser, senior methods adviser at the AARP Public Policy Institute, said the group’s concern was the interplay between low vaccination rates in the community allowing the virus to soar and low vaccination rates among staff increasing the likelihood of bringing Covid into a nursing home and “making these residents vulnerable if the virus gets in.” “
Houser said that while things have improved a lot since the height of the pandemic, “Covid has never gone away, and because it is still circulating among nursing homes in every state and among communities in every. State, there is still the potential for him to recover and have another peak.
The AARP has been tracking vaccination rates among staff as well as ongoing cases among residents, he said. There have been small increases in cases and signs of increasing cases among workers, and Houser said concern is that this could eventually lead to a larger increase.
“We hope not to see a big increase, but we are concerned that it will, especially in states with low vaccination rates,” he said.
Rupali Limaye, director of behavioral and implementation science at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health International Vaccine Access Center, said staff at long-term care facilities and nursing homes is often “essentially in very close contact with and therefore at higher levels.” exposure to risk for people who are also susceptible. So this continues to be a major challenge.
On Monday, nearly 60 major healthcare organizations signed a joint declaration supporting immunization mandates for healthcare and long-term care workers. Among them was LeadingAge, which represents more than 5,000 nonprofit aging service providers, including nursing homes.
A challenge for providers, especially in communities with low immunization rates and where there may be mistrust of vaccines, is whether a tenure will exacerbate labor shortages.
Katie Smith Sloan, CEO of LeadingAge, said in a statement to NBC News that as new variants of Covid emerge and proliferate, “even fully vaccinated seniors in long-term care appear to be at risk.” .
“Vaccines are a game changer – the most effective tool we have to protect ourselves from the virus. That is why we support the requirement for vaccines for current and new staff in long-term care facilities and other health facilities, ”she said. “We don’t want what we’ve been through to repeat itself, for anyone – not for the elderly or the caregivers. “
“Healthcare providers have worked tirelessly to steadily increase the number of residents and staff vaccinated, and Covid deaths have dropped, but it’s time to do more. We can start saving more lives today by ensuring that staff are fully immunized, ”she said.
LeadingAge said that according to the latest data available on Thursday, 66.63% of staff were fully vaccinated and 89.38% of residents were fully vaccinated.
“As we see in the general population where immunization rates vary from state to state and community to community, we also find that immunization rates among long-term care workers also vary and that the ‘reluctance to vaccinate is very real,’ said Lisa Sanders, director of media relations for LeadingAge. . “It’s an ongoing process. It’s constant.”
The idea of epidemics is particularly alarming for people like Bill Borrelle, whose 95-year-old mother is legally blind and hard of hearing and lives in an assisted living facility in New Jersey. Borrelle is also the founder of FACE NJ, or Family Advocate Care Experience, an advocacy group for family members with loved ones in long-term care in the state.
Running a Facebook group with more than 1,500 members, Borelle saw “great concern” from family members, “one after another” writing to describe the closures at the facility.
Their fear is that there will be “an increase in cases in facilities that will trigger closures again, families will be kept away and isolation can kill,” he said.
When the pandemic began, long-term care facilities across the country closed their doors to visitors and largely kept residents in their rooms to protect them. But lockdown meant to protect the most vulnerable in some cases also threatened their lives as patients deteriorated in isolation.
The trauma of this reality returned for Borrelle when he received an email this week which he said made ‘a heartbeat’: an unvaccinated member of staff where his mother lives tested positive for Covid .
Fortunately, the individual generally has no contact with residents, and the facility said no changes have been made to its visitation policy so far.
“But imagine if that sentence ended differently,” Borrelle said. “In an instant, everything comes back. I don’t want her to die alone, and I’ve known too many stories of great people who are in this group.
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