AARP Sounds Alarm on COVID Vaccination Rates for Nevada Nursing Home Staff

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The latest release of AARP’s Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard incorporates new data on vaccination rates among staff and residents, and finds that just 21.8% of Nevada nursing homes meet an industry benchmark of having at least 75% of staff fully vaccinated.

Nationally, slightly more than half of health care workers in nursing homes were fully vaccinated (56% and about 78% of residents were fully vaccinated as of the week ending June 20. Here in Nevada, 65.8% of residents have been fully vaccinated and 55.6% of staff.

At the national level, COVID cases and deaths have dropped significantly from the previous dashboard release. Deaths of nursing home residents in Nevada continue to decrease from what they were in the previous period, dropping from a rate of 2.93 to zero per 100 residents since December 2020. New infections among residents and staff also declined during the same period. Resident cases went from 9.5 to 0.39 per 100 residents, and new staff cases increased/declined from 13.9 to 0.17 per 100 residents.

“The drop in cases and deaths in nursing homes is welcome news,” said Maria Moore, AARP Nevada state director. “But the potential for the highly contagious Delta variant causing more harm to residents and staff is very real. We must do everything we can to keep them safe from the virus, which means encouraging residents and staff in long-term care facilities to get a free COVID vaccine to protect themselves, their family and their community.”

While rates of cases and deaths have improved from the height of the pandemic, chronic problems revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic continue. The most recent data shows that 6.6% of nursing homes in Nevada had urgent need for PPE in the four-week period ending June 20. Also, during this time period, 24.6% of nursing homes reported a shortage of nurses or aides, a slight increase from the previous reporting period.

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, to identify specific areas of concern at the national and state levels in a timely manner.

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