The pandemic exposed the flaws in the government’s rating system.
The state health inspections do little to punish homes with poor records of preventing and combating infections. From 2017 to 2019, The Times found, inspectors at least once cited nearly 60 percent – more than 2,000 – of the country’s five-star facilities for failing to follow basic safety measures, such as regular hand washing. Yet they achieved top ratings.
In San Bernardino, California, inspectors wrote Del Rosa Villa for four different offenses against infection. It retained its five stars. Ninety residents at the 104-bed plant contracted the coronavirus and 13 died.
Del Rosa Villa officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Life Care Centers of Kirkland, Wash., The first nursing home in the United States to document cases of coronavirus, had poor infection control despite its five stars in 2019. State inspectors wrote this because they did not consistently implement an effective infection control program.
Thirty-nine of the facility’s residents died of Covid-19. The house has 190 beds.
Leigh Atherton, a spokeswoman for Life Care, said the quote was the only decline in infection control that inspectors had identified over 32 previous visits. She said the house quickly rectified the problem.
Forty-one deaths
If the rating system works as intended, it would have provided clues as to which homes are likely to be out of control and which homes are likely to become cluttered.
That’s not what happened.
The Times found that there was little or no link between star ratings and how homes fare during the pandemic. At five-star facilities, the mortality rate of Covid-19 was only half a percentage point lower than for facilities that rated lower. And the mortality rate was slightly lower at two-star directions than at four-star homes.
The location of a facility, the infection rate of the surrounding community and the race of residents of nursing homes were predictors of whether an outbreak in a nursing home would suffer. The star rating did not matter.