New COVID-19 Nursing Home Dashboard Spotlights Texas and National Trends

AARP Texas Director Tina Tran said today that a new AARP dashboard shows how Texas nursing homes are handling the coronavirus pandemic, which could provide state officials with useful insights.

“Texas officials and the nursing home industry each have a duty to protect Texans living in nursing homes,” Tran said. “As we head into a dangerous season for the coronavirus this winter, this new tool will be helpful in tracking how Texas and other states are managing the crisis.”

AARP Texas has fought for daily and public reporting of COVID-19 cases and deaths at the local, state and national levels, Tran noted. AARP Texas has also advocated for regular, frequent, rapid-result testing of staff, residents, visitors and vendors at all Texas long-term care facilities, and has urged action to ensure that all facilities have adequate supplies of personal protective equipment.

Using data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services—which is self-reported by nursing homes—the AARP Public Policy Institute, in collaboration with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio, created the AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard to provide four-week snapshots of the virus’ infiltration into nursing homes and impact on nursing home residents and staff. Notably, the first release of the dashboard on Oct. 14 reveals that nursing homes in every state reported shortages of PPE, ranging from 8 percent of facilities in the best-performing states, to 60 percent in the lowest-performing state. The dashboard also compared state and national data on COVID-19 cases and deaths, staff cases and staffing shortages.

The federal data does not include coronavirus cases among residents or staff of assisted-living facilities, which are included in Texas government statistics occasionally cited by AARP Texas.

In the period from Aug. 24-Sept. 20, AARP’s dashboard reports that Texas had:

• 3.7 COVID-19 cases per 100 nursing home residents;

• .8 COVID deaths per 100 nursing home residents;

• 3.1 nursing home staff cases per 100 residents;

• 17.9 percent of nursing homes without a one-week supply of PPE;

• 35.7 percent of nursing homes had a shortage of direct-care workers.

Full data for Texas for this period is available here: https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/pdf/2020/10/texas-nursing-home-dashboard-october-2020-aarp.pdf

More resources and information on COVID-19 and nursing homes can be found at aarp.org/nursinghomes