It seems no one is taking covid-19 seriously anymore, said Mollee Loveland, a nursing home aide who lives outside Pittsburgh.
Loveland has seen patients and coworkers at the nursing home where she works die from the viral disease.
Now she has a new worry: bringing home the coronavirus and unwittingly infecting her infant daughter, Maya, born in May.
Loveland’s maternity leave ended in late June, when Maya wasn’t yet 2 months old. Infants cannot be vaccinated against covid until they are 6 months old. Children younger than that suffer the highest rates of hospitalization of any age group except people 75 or older.
Between her patients’ complex medical needs and their close proximity to one another, covid continues to pose a grave threat to Loveland’s nursing home — and to the 15,000 other certified nursing homes in the U.S. where some 1.2 million people live.
Despite this risk, a CDC report published in April found that just 4 in 10 nursing home residents in the U.S. received an updated covid vaccine in the winter of 2023-24. The analysis drew on data from Oct. 16, 2023, through Feb. 11, 2024, and was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC report also revealed that during January’s covid peak, the rate of hospitalizations among nursing home residents was more than eight times that of all U.S. adults, age 70 and older.
One major medical system operating in the Dakotas, Sanford Health, has managed more than two dozen nursing homes since a 2019 merger with the long-term care chain Good Samaritan Society.
In some of these nursing homes more than 70% of residents were vaccinated last fall and winter — at one Sanford facility in Canton, South Dakota, the rate exceeded 90%.
Sanford achieved this by leveraging the size of the health system to make delivering vaccines more efficient, said Jeremy Cauwels, Sanford’s chief medical officer. He also credited a close working relationship with a South Dakota-based pharmacy chain, Lewis Drug.
But the most crucial factor was that many of Sanford’s nursing home patients are cared for by doctors who are also employed by the health system. At most Sanford’s North and South Dakota nursing homes, these clinicians provide on-site primary care, meaning patients don’t have to leave the facilities to see doctors.
These employed doctors have been critical in persuading patients to stay up to date on their covid shots, Cauwels said. For example, a medical director who worked at the Good Samaritan nursing home in Canton was a long-serving physician with close ties to that community.
“An appropriate one-on-one conversation with someone who cares about you and has a history of doing so in the past, for us, has resulted in much better numbers than other places have been able to get to nationally,” said Cauwels, who added that Sanford still needs to work on reaching more patients.