As pandemic raged and thousands died, USG regulators cleared most nursing homes of infection-control violations

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Fri, 2020-10-30 12:31 — mike kraft

As pandemic raged and thousands died, government regulators cleared most nursing homes of infection-control violations All told, nursing homes that received a clean bill of health earlier this year saw about 290,000 coronavirus cases and 43,000 deaths among residents and staff, state and federal data shows. Debbie Cenziper, Joel Jacobs, Shawn Mulcahy Washington Post

At the outset of a looming pandemic, just weeks after the first known coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil, the woman responsible for helping to protect 1.3 million residents in America’s nursing homes laid out an urgent strategy to slow the spread of infection.

In the suburbs of Seattle, federal inspectors had found the Life Care Center of Kirkland failed to properly care for ailing patients or alert authorities to a growing number of respiratory infections. At least 146 other nursing homes across the country had confirmed coronavirus cases in late March when Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, vowed to help “keep what happened in Kirkland from happening again.”

The federal agency and its state partners, Verma said, would conduct a series of newly strengthened inspections to ensure 15,400 Medicare-certified nursing homes were heeding long-standing regulations meant to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. It was another key component of a national effort, launched in early March, to shore up safety protocols for the country’s most fragile residents during an unprecedented health emergency.

But the government inspectors deployed by CMS during the first six months of the crisis cleared nearly 8 in 10 nursing homes of any infection-control violations even as the deadliest pandemic to strike the United States in a century sickened and killed thousands, a Washington Post investigation found.

Those cleared included homes with mounting coronavirus outbreaks before or during the inspections, as well as those that saw cases and deaths spiral upward after inspectors reported no violations had been found, in some cases multiple times. All told, homes that received a clean bill of health earlier this year had about 290,000 coronavirus cases and 43,000 deaths among residents and staff, state and federal data shows....

ALso see: JAMA study:Comparative Performance of Private Equity–Owned US Nursing Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2772306