Feds Under Pressure to Publicly Track Nursing Home Outbreaks

Federal health officials are coming under increasing pressure to start publicly tracking coronavirus infections and deaths in nursing homes amid criticism they have not been transparent about the scope of outbreaks across the country that have already claimed thousands of lives.

Experts say the lack of tracking and transparency has been a major blind spot, and that publicizing outbreaks as they happen could not only alert nearby communities and anguished relatives but also help officials see where to focus testing and other safety measures.

"This is basic public health — you track this, you study it, and you learn from it," said David Grabowski, who specializes in health care policy at Harvard Medical School. He said it's difficult to have confidence in officials' ability to contain the virus if they aren't tracking where it has struck and why.

Such an action by the agencies that oversee the nation's 15,000 nursing homes is seen as long overdue, coming more than a month after a nursing home in Washington state became the first COVID-19 hot spot in the U.S. with an outbreak that ultimately killed 43 people and a near-daily drumbeat of new cases that in some cases has forced entire homes to be evacuated.

Because the federal government has not been releasing a count, The Associated Press has been keeping its own running tally of nursing home outbreak deaths based on media reports and state health departments. The AP's latest count of at least 4,817 deaths is up from about 450 just two weeks ago.

"We recognize there should be more reporting," said Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, during a call with reporters on Wednesday.

Verma said her agency is working with the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention to increase reporting on outbreaks. But she did not provide details on how that would work or what information would be made public, other than to say her agency was considering requiring homes to disclose information to residents and their family members.

Many individual states have added to the lack of transparency by releasing only totals of infections and deaths and not details about specific outbreaks. Foremost among them is the nation's leader, New York, which accounts for more than 2,477 nursing home deaths — about 20% of the state's entire death total — but has so far refused to detail specific outbreaks, citing privacy concerns.