A brand new COVID-19 spike in America’s long-term-care amenities emerged within the West and Northeast final week, with each areas reporting their highest numbers of recent instances up to now six months. The Midwest and South noticed a small downturn in new instances, which is promising, but the week nonetheless noticed the nation’s highest variety of newly reported instances—51,574—in long-term-care facilities since we began amassing these knowledge in Might.
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Nationally, deaths elevated by 27 p.c from the earlier week. Greater than a 3rd of long-term-care-facility deaths have been reported within the Midwest; Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota every reported greater than 200 deaths. Within the South, Texas reported the very best variety of new deaths, 360.
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COVID-19 knowledge reporting remains to be catching up from expected lags that occurred around Thanksgiving, as many state well being departments shifted their reporting schedules or closed due to the vacation. These delays may make this week’s newly reported instances and deaths appear unusually excessive in contrast with the earlier week. We count on the data-reporting course of from states to easy out this week earlier than one other interval of irregularity round Christmas.
The Northeast is starting to see COVID-19 case will increase paying homage to that area’s devastating outbreaks firstly of the pandemic. The 838 deaths the area reported within the week between November 26 and December 3 is the biggest enhance since early June, and 38 p.c of those deaths got here from Pennsylvania. That state final week hit a six-month excessive within the variety of recorded instances, with 4,970. That represented extra long-term-care-facility instances than any state within the nation besides California, which reported 5,075. Pennsylvania’s new instances doubled the earlier week’s enhance, but it surely’s attainable {that a} post-Thanksgiving backlog is artificially inflating these numbers.
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The COVID Monitoring Undertaking hasn’t been capable of get hold of present knowledge concerning the variety of individuals residing in Pennsylvania’s long-term-care amenities. But when numbers have remained comparatively fixed over the previous 5 years, we are able to estimate, based mostly on a 2015 variety of residents in LTC amenities, that almost 30 p.c of individuals residing in these environments have gotten COVID-19. Pennsylvania combines workers and residents in its long-term-care-facility loss of life counts, however based mostly on an evaluation of our knowledge set, we all know that 99 p.c of all COVID-19 deaths from LTC amenities are amongst residents. We estimate that almost one in 5 Pennsylvania long-term-care residents who contracted COVID-19 has died. We’re additionally keeping track of Colorado, which recorded a six-month excessive for each instances and deaths.
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Final week, Minnesota reported its highest variety of long-term-care-facility instances and deaths to this point. In contrast to many different states, Minnesota’s info is just not traceable on the facility degree. Initially of the summer season, when Minnesota was reporting that about 80 percent of its COVID-19 deaths were from long-term-care facilities, officers refused to report instances and deaths at particular nursing properties and different long-term-care amenities, citing privacy concerns. Although Minnesota does present an inventory of facility names with present COVID-19 outbreaks, extra granular knowledge—corresponding to what number of instances and deaths are occurring inside every facility—are nonetheless not out there.
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Lengthy-term-care amenities report COVID-19 knowledge by the CDC’s Nationwide Healthcare Security Community (NHSN), and this week, NHSN introduced modifications to COVID-19 knowledge definitions. These modifications embrace the elimination of “suspected” instances, and a shift from “confirmed instances” to “optimistic instances.” NHSN additionally mentioned that optimistic instances might be decided by a optimistic antigen-test end result or by the gold-standard PCR check. The modifications are noteworthy as a result of in July, the Trump administration began sending speedy antigen exams to nursing homes to repeatedly check residents and workers.
