After completing research on the federal government data, it’s been found that it severely understated what COVID-19 did in nursing homes during 2020.
The CDC is missing around 12% of COVID-19 cases for residents in nursing homes and 14% of the deaths.
These estimates were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Network Open, by a researcher from Harvard and her team.
This suggests that 118,300 residents died of COVID-19, making up 30% of COVID deaths nationally.
The reason for missing data appears to be that federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services weren’t required to report deaths or positive cases until May of 2020.
3 in 10 deaths related to the virus are estimated to be nursing homes residents.
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