Wyoming Nursing Homes Hit Hard By COVID-19 Omicron Variant

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Wyoming saw large increases in its numbers of nursing home residents, and nursing home staff who were infected by COVID-19 in the four week period ending 2/20/22. That is according to AARP’s COVID-19 Nursing Home Dashboard.

Wyoming’s rate of 23.10 cases of COVID-19 among nursing home staff in the four week period ending Feb. 22, 2022 was second highest in the nation and the highest among the contiguous 48 states. That rate was a large increase from the previous month’s 15.7%. The 23.10 staff cases per 100 nursing home residents (429 total cases) was a new high for the number of staff cases in Wyoming.

In the last month (the four weeks ending on 2/20/22) in Wyoming, there were .75 COVID-19 deaths (14 total) per 100 nursing home residents, the third-highest rate in the nation. That is up from the .11 nursing home residents per 100 who were reported as COVID-19 positive on 1/23/22. Nationally, more than 4,000 residents died from COVID-19 in this four-week period, however, the death rate remains lower than at any time in 2020 before vaccines were available.

Only four states had higher rates of nursing home resident cases than Wyoming’s 12.5 per 100 residents (233 cases) over that same period of time. West Virginia had the nation’s highest COVID-19 rate among nursing home residents at 16.3 cases per 100 residents.

Omicron’s Impact on The Numbers

According to AARP, states experienced the Omicron surge at different times. Nineteen states saw an increase in resident cases in the four weeks ending Feb. 2, compared to the previous four weeks, and five states also had an increase in staff cases. These five states – Alaska, Idaho, Montana, West Virginia, and Wyoming – all recorded pandemic highs for staff cases in the most recent four-week period, even as the nation as a whole was coming down from the Omicron wave of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 Dashboard did offer some good news. CDC has released summary data covering the three weeks since 2/20/22, which is the data cutoff for this month’s Dashboard. In these subsequent three weeks, rates of resident deaths and resident and staff cases have continued to decline rapidly, down about 75%-80% nationally, to pre-Omicron levels.

About the COVID-19 Nursing Home Dashboard

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, with the goal of identifying specific areas of concern at the national and state levels in a timely manner. AARP’s Nursing Home COVID-19 dashboard has tracked five categories of impact since summer 2020, as well as vaccination rates of nursing home residents and health care staff and is updated every month to track trends over time.