New AARP Analysis: COVID Cases Continue to Rise in Kansas Nursing Homes

AARP has released the August Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard, which tracks nursing home data including cases as well as resident and staff vaccination rates, and the news is alarming with COVID-19 cases increasing among staff and residents. In the four weeks ending August 22, 2021, the number of new nursing home resident cases of COVID-19 increased to 176, more than five times as many as the previous month. The number of new staff cases jumped during the same time period to 336, more than four times as many as reported in the previous dashboard.

Cases are concentrated among the unvaccinated; nationally, those residents were three times as likely to contract COVID-19 last month compared to residents who are fully vaccinated.

AARP has called on long-term care facilities to require that staff and residents be vaccinated against coronavirus. There were modest increases in vaccination rates in this four-week period, with 86.7% (up from 86.5%) of nursing home residents and 59.7% (up from 56%) of staff fully vaccinated as of August 22.

"This month's dashboard underscores why all staff and residents in long-term care facilities must be vaccinated as quickly as possible," said AARP Kansas Volunteer State President Judy Bellome, a Registered Nurse with long term care experience. “For unvaccinated nursing home residents, their risk of an infection is back up to the levels we saw a year ago. Facilities should require that all staff and residents are vaccinated, so we can slow the spread of new variants and save lives."

The AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard analyzes federally reported data in four-week periods going back to June 1, 2020. Using this data, the AARP Public Policy Institute, in collaboration with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio, created the dashboard to provide snapshots of the virus' infiltration into nursing homes and impact on nursing home residents and staff, with the goal of identifying specific areas of concern at the national and state levels in a timely manner.

The full Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard is available at www.aarp.org/nursinghomedashboard, and an AARP story about this month's data is available here. For more information on how COVID is impacting nursing homes and AARP's advocacy on this issue, visit www.aarp.org/nursinghomes.