2020-12-30

About nursing home deaths

The Wuhan Flu has been deadly in nursing homes, as we all are well aware:

Despite it all, Ottawa still has no public database keeping track of how badly long-term care homes are being hit on a national scale.

That’s left people like freelance journalist Nora Loreto to try and tally up the national numbers on their own.

"We are on track to be much worse than the first wave in terms of infections,” Loreto said. “There's certainly more facilities that are affected by outbreaks and those numbers grow every day by quite a lot."

According to Loreto, a whopping 77 per cent of COVID-19 deaths can be traced to long-term care and senior homes.

One of the big things that conservative media, unlike the lying far-left mainstream media, has been forthcoming with is that nursing home deaths shouldn't change how the rest of us live our lives.

To wit, let's ask the ultimate question: how many nursing home deaths were we expecting in 2020? Fortunately, a 2010 study by  Anne Kelly, Jessamyn Conell-Price, Kenneth Covinsky, Irena Stijacic Cenzer, Anna Chang, W. John Boscardin, and Alexander K. Smith actually answers that question:

DESIGN

Retrospective cohort study.

SETTING

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults aged 50 and older.

PARTICIPANTS

1,817 nursing home residents who died between 1992 and 2006.

MEASUREMENTS

Our primary outcome was length of stay, defined as the number of months between the nursing home admission and the date of death. Covariates included demographic, social, and clinical factors drawn from the HRS interview conducted closest to the date of nursing home admission.

RESULTS

The mean age of decedents was 83.3 (SD 9.0) and the majority were female (59.12%), and White (81.5%). Median and mean length of stay prior to death were 5 months (IQR 1-20) and 13.7 months (SD 18.4), respectively. Fifty-three percent died within 6 months of placement. Large differences in median length of stay were observed by gender (men, 3 months vs. women, 8 months) and net worth (highest quartile, 3 months vs. lowest quartile, 9 months) (all p<.001). These differences persisted after adjustment for age, sex, marital status, net worth, geographic region, and diagnosed chronic conditions (cancer, hypertension, diabetes, lung disease, heart disease, and stroke).

INTRODUCTION

Death has become institutionalized over the last 100 years.1 Today, 25% of all deaths in the nation occur in nursing homes and the proportion of all deaths that occur in these settings continues to rise.2 By the year 2020, an estimated 40% of Americans will die in a nursing home.3

That source [3] takes you to a 2003 study by the way, but the key takeaway is that it was estimated in 2020 that 40% of American deaths would occur in nursing homes.

So how many Wuhan Flu patients have died in American nursing homes? As NBC News reports (based on The Atlantic's COVID Tracking Project), 39.3%.

Pretty much the exact number predicted from the study, in other words. Well at least how the Wuhan Flu is concerned. How many non-Kung Flu deaths have occurred in nursing homes in 2020? Data like that won't be available for months (if ever), but it's estimated that another 40,000 died between March and November.

Let's not pretend, by the way, that this is unique to U.S. nursing homes as pathetic pro-government-healthcare leftists claim. Neglect and excess deaths have been seen throughout the western world from private-public systems as well as fully public systems. Sweden and the Netherlands top the world in publicly funded nursing homes: you know all about Sweden, but the Dutch nursing homes have also been COVID hotspots without a Donald Trump or Anders Tegnell in sight to blame.

You've seen/heard by now that video of nursing home neglect in Britain:

This isn't unique to the United Kingdom, of course. Even Japan, another country with lots of government funding for nursing homes, is subject to issues of neglect. Ontario, same deal.

So how many 2020 nursing home deaths did we expect in these countries? As with so much Wuhan Flu coverage, you have to look at published information from 2019 or earlier to ensure that you're getting real information and not politicized bullshit.