The Continuing Saga Of COVID-19 In Long Term Care Facilities And New Research

May 21st, 2020 by Tom Lynch

We have written about the ongoing death spiral in LTCFs four times – herehere, here, and here.

We’ve done this, because for three months authorities have known that LTCF’s were lethal hot spots, the most lethal in the country, actually. And to this day the federal government has devoted nothing more than lip service to it. Don’t believe me? Read on.

Last Thursday, OSHA issued COVID-19 Guidelines, not Requirements, for nursing homes. The Guidelines recommend screening residents and staff for symptoms, keeping everyone six feet apart and creating alternatives to group activities. I challenge anyone to read the Guidelines and find the word, “must.” OSHA has become the quintessential paper tiger. Remember, it only took three months to produce these groundbreaking recommendations.

And it is now exactly one month since CMS Administrator Seema Verma, to much ballyhoo, announced new COVID-19 reporting requirements for nursing homes. Specifically, CMS was requiring:

…nursing homes to inform residents, their families and representatives of COVID-19 cases in their facilities. In addition, as part of President Trump’s Opening Up America, CMS will now require nursing homes to report cases of COVID-19 directly to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  This information must be reported in accordance with existing privacy regulations and statute. This measure augments longstanding requirements for reporting infectious disease to State and local health departments. Finally, CMS will also require nursing homes to fully cooperate with CDC surveillance efforts around COVID-19 spread.

So, how has that worked out? Keep in mind that, as reported by the New York Times, “While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.” As of 9 May, the Times reported the death toll in Long Term Care Facilitites (LTCF) was 28,100. Those are the ones we know of.

Unfortunately, that number is probably low, because we are still waiting for the CMS reporting requirement to produce anything. And now, it appears CMS’s plan has changed. On 14 May, one week ago, Administrator Verma said data from LTCFs would not be posted on the CDC website. Rather, it will be reported by the end of this month somewhere on Medicare’s website Nursing Home Compare.

Nursing Home Compare is exactly what the name suggests. It is a site where, by inputting a zip code, one can compare what Medicare calls Health Deficiencies in specific nursing homes within the relative geography chosen. It includes a humongously large database containing a number of datasets devoted to health deficiencies. This may be the place one would search for nursing home data regarding COVID-19. But we won’t know that until “the end of this month.” Maybe.

We shall see.

By the way, Verma’s announcement of one month ago began with this:

Today, under the leadership of President Trump, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced new regulatory requirements that will require nursing homes to inform residents, their families and representatives of COVID-19 cases in their facilities.

“Leadership.” Really?

Research on what is most effective to stop COVID-19 transmission

Two new research papers look into the effectiveness of the measures governments have either required or recommended for slowing the spread of the virus.

The first, Strong Social Distancing Measures In The United States Reduced The COVID-19 Growth Rate, published in Health Affairs on 14 May, investigated the efficacy of four social distancing policies taken by most state and local governments: Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs), public school closures, bans on large social gatherings, and closures of entertainment-related businesses. Specifically, the researchers were trying to estimate the relationship between social distancing policies and the exponential growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases using an event-study regression with multiple treatments.

There were surprising results.

First, from the Paper:

Adoption of government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the daily growth rate by 5.4 percentage points after 1–5 days, 6.8 after 6–10 days, 8.2 after 11–15 days, and 9.1 after 16–20 days. Holding the amount of voluntary social distancing constant, these results imply 10 times greater spread by April 27 without SIPOs (10 million cases) and more than 35 times greater spread without any of the four measures (35 million). Our paper illustrates the potential danger of exponential spread in the absence of interventions,…

Second, only two of the policies produced statistically significant impacts on the growth rate at the 95% confidence level: SIPOs and the closures of entertainment-related businesses.

In contrast, the researchers found no evidence that bans on large social gatherings or school closures influenced the growth rate. That is not to say there was no influence on the growth rate due to these measures, just that whatever influence was there, it was not statistically significant.

The school closure finding is important as school boards and college trustees ponder whether to reopen in the fall. Yesterday, Boston College, where I spent some of my youth, announced that the campus would be open for classes for the fall semester.

The second PaperFace Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review, “synthesized the relevant literature to inform multiple areas: 1) transmission characteristics of COVID-19, 2) filtering characteristics and efficacy of masks, 3) estimated population impacts of widespread community mask use, and 4) sociological considerations for policies concerning mask-wearing.”

The verdict of the researchers: “The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces the transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected droplets in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at stopping spread of the virus when compliance is high. The decreased transmissibility could substantially reduce the death toll and economic impact while the cost of the intervention is low.” In otherwords, masks work.

This paper carried the following supplemental tidbit:

While the focus of this article is on preventing the spread of COVID-19 disease through public mask wearing, many countries face concurrent epidemics of contagious respiratory diseases like tuberculosis and influenza. Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people globally per year, and in 2018, 10 million people fell ill. Face covering has been shown to also reduce the transmission of tuberculosis. Similarly, influenza transmission in the community declined by 44% in Hong Kong after the implementation of changes in population behaviors, including social distancing and increased mask wearing, enforced in most stores, during the COVID-19 outbreak.
This could be important when one considers that an effective vaccine for tuberculosis exists: the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine. It isn’t usually given to infants in the U.S., because the disease isn’t a widespread problem here. However, when we eventually have a vaccine for COVID-19, we’re going to have to face the fact that getting it to people around the world is not going to be easy.
And, God help us, we’ll also have to deal with the anti-vax cult living among us here at home.

 

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