What's more, nursing homes across the country have reported shortages of medical-grade masks, gowns, gloves and other forms of personal protective equipment that help to block the transmission of the virus, an AARP analysis finds. Plus, residents in these facilities tend to be frailer and have more complex health conditions than older adults living on their own, making it more difficult for them to fend off a new infection. Introduce a new virus to the mix - one the body hasn't met before and has no defenses against - and “it can just overwhelm the system,” Inouye adds.Īs far as long-term care centers go, the CDC says their “communal nature” - with a lot of people living and working together in a confined, indoor space - creates an environment ripe for rapid spread of a pathogen like the coronavirus. And so once we get sick with COVID, we don't have all those layers and layers of resiliency that we do as a younger person.' “Our lungs don't have as good ventilatory and clearing capacity, our kidneys don't function quite as well, our liver doesn't function quite as well. 'Every organ system changes,” Harvard's Inouye explains. The immune system naturally weakens with age, making older adults more susceptible to infections and less capable of fighting them off. Eighty percent of older adults have at least one chronic health condition, and a number of these common diseases - from obesity to cancer - are known to complicate a coronavirus infection and worsen the severity of COVID-19.Īnother explanation: immune function. One reason COVID-19 seems to be especially lethal in older adults is the prevalence of chronic disease. “We created the dashboard with data updated monthly to provide a window into states’ progress in protecting nursing home residents and staff from this deadly disease.' Chronic conditions, aging immune systems create perfect storm Reinhard, senior vice president and director of the AARP Public Policy Institute. 'Transparency has never been more important,” says Susan C. As a continuation of its efforts, AARP's Public Policy Institute, in partnership with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio, recently launched the AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard to aggregate and analyze data pertaining to cases, deaths, necessary equipment and staffing shortages in facilities throughout the country. Since the beginning of the pandemic, AARP has called on policymakers to improve transparency, collect consistent data and prioritize testing and quality care for residents and staff in nursing homes. Factor in residents and staff from assisted living and skilled nursing facilities, and the number shoots up to about 84,000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation - or nearly 40 percent of all U.S. More than 61,000 nursing home residents have died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

COVID-19 runs rampant in nursing homesĪs difficult as the situation has been in hospitals nationwide, long-term care facilities are shouldering an even larger burden. They don't get to hold their hands,” Masud says. And despite being able to connect with their loved ones virtually, they are unable to see or say goodbye to their spouses, children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews in person once they enter the hospital. Similar to Brooklyn Hospital Center, a large share of patients who have received intensive care for COVID-19 at Houston Methodist were 60 or older. Masud describes the COVID-19 patients he's seen as “very complex” and “very, very sick.” More than 1,600 miles away from Brooklyn Hospital Center, Faisal Masud, M.D., has dealt with a similarly dire situation at Houston Methodist Hospital, where he is the director of critical care. While some were indeed young, the vast majority of those bearing the brunt of COVID-19's wrath were older adults. Over time, Gasperino saw the entire hospital transform into a makeshift intensive care unit to accommodate all of the critically ill coronavirus patients. 'I just couldn't believe how many new people were coming in that night, incredibly sick, requiring mechanical ventilation,” he says. Yet sick patients kept coming in, “one after another, after another,” recalls James Gasperino, M.D., the hospital's chair of medicine and chief of critical care. It was an already trying spring evening - at the peak of New York's coronavirus crisis - when medication, morale and masks were all running low at Brooklyn Hospital Center.

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