AARP COVID-19 Home Dashboard Shows Improvements
The latest release of AARP's Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard shows that both cases and deaths in Wyoming nursing homes fell in the four weeks ending February 14.
The number of nursing home deaths per 100 residents in Wyoming saw a substantial drop from 2.22 per 100 residents for the four week period ending Jan. 17 to just .76 for the four week period ending Feb. 14. The nursing home resident cases per 100 residents also dropped over the past four weeks ending Jan. 17 from 10.4 cases per 100 nursing home residents in Wyoming to just 3.6 for the four week period ending Feb. 14.
“The nursing home dashboard numbers are showing improvement across the board and we are pleased to see that,” says AARP Wyoming State Director Sam Shumway. “We are now starting to return to levels of infection and death rates we haven’t seen since last fall. We are optimistic that those trends continue.”
The COVID-19 death rate in nursing homes is the lowest since the four week period ending Nov. 18, when the death rate was .25 per 100 residents. For the first four, four-week periods of the AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard, there were no deaths in Wyoming nursing homes. The death rate peaked at 2.95 deaths per 100 residents during the four week period ending Nov. 15. That was one of the 10 highest ratios nationwide for a four-week period since the inception of the dashboard.
Other good news coming out of the latest dashboard snapshot included a large drop in staff COVID-19 cases, with the ratio dropping from 8.1 staff cases per 100 residents during the four-week period ending Jan. 17 to 3.8 staff cases per 100 residents in the latest four-week period.
The dashboard’s final two measures - percentage of facilities without at least a week’s worth of personal protective equipment (14%) and nursing homes with staffing shortages (25 %) both saw improvements as well over their previous snapshots and were at their lowest levels since last fall.
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. For more information on how COVID is impacting nursing homes and AARP's advocacy on this issue, visit www.aarp.org/nursinghomes.
