Underreporting of Early Nursing Home COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Federal Data
September 9, 2021
Elizabeth White, APRN, PhD, member of the executive committee for the Health Care Systems Core, wrote a commentary to accompany an article examining underreporting of early nursing home COVID-19 cases and death in federal data published in JAMA Network Open.
The initial US epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic was a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, in late February 2020.1 This event was a foreshadowing of the catastrophic and disproportionate toll COVID-19 would take on nursing home residents over the course of the pandemic. However, measuring the true impact of COVID-19 in nursing homes is challenging owing to inconsistent data collection in the early months of the pandemic. Dr. White offers commentary on a study by Shen and colleagues examining differences in COVID-19 cases and deaths among nursing home residents reported for those early months from two sources.