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Staffing shortages are also driving poor infection-control practices, according to Charlene Harrington, professor emerita and a nursing home researcher at the University of California, San

Francisco. “When you’re short-staffed, workers are just running from patient to patient — trying to feed them, take them to the toilet, the basic things,” she says, “and things like

handwashing go out the window.” With so many staff infected with the virus, more temporary workers are entering nursing homes. “If the staff don’t know the residents, the routines, the

facility’s procedures, that can be really bad for infection control,” Harrington says. VACCINES SLOW TO ARRIVE  Although almost all states have followed the CDC’s guidance by moving nursing

home residents and staff to the very front of their vaccine line, slow distribution, poor uptake among staff, and issues with the federal program charged with vaccinating America’s long-term

care community have delayed the effort. “While the COVID vaccine holds great promise for everyone, the thought the most vulnerable cannot get that vaccine in real time is outrageous,” says

AARP’s Ryan. It will be well into February before nursing home residents and staff are actually protected from the virus by vaccines, says Sondra Norder, president and CEO of St. Paul Elder

Services in Wisconsin. For assisted living residents and staff, that date is even further away.  “We really need the community to understand that the continued risk to facilities like ours

is really serious, especially now with cases surging across the country,” Norder says, as more than a quarter-million new cases and near or above 4,000 deaths across the U.S. have been

reported on recent days, setting records for the pandemic. “Even though there’s light at the end of the tunnel there, the lights are all still blinking red for us.” The analysis, conducted

by the AARP Public Policy Institute and the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio, draws primarily on data acquired from the Nursing Home COVID-19 Public File by CMS.

Nursing homes are federally certified and are required to submit data to the government each week. The analysis groups data into the following reporting periods: June 1 to June 28, June 29

to July 25, July 26 to Aug. 23, Aug. 24 to Sept. 20, Sept. 21 to Oct. 18, Oct. 19 to Nov. 15, Nov. 16 to Dec. 6 (a Thanksgiving Special Report) and Nov. 23 to Dec. 20. Around 93 percent of

the nation’s 15,000-plus nursing homes submitted data for each reporting period. The analysis focuses on five key categories of COVID-19 impacts — resident cases, resident deaths, supply of

PPE, staff cases and staff shortages — and captures data only from federally certified nursing homes, not all long-term facilities (such as assisted living, independent living, memory care

and others), as some other tallies do. This is the fourth in a series of monthly AARP analyses. An updated analysis will be released next month, as new federal data becomes available.