With the change, the number of COVID deaths in nursing homes in Massachusetts during the 13-month pandemic dropped from 6,722 to 5,502, a drop of more than 18 percent. The decline will drop Massachusetts from the top 10 states with the highest death rates for nursing homes, based on data collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Marylou Sudders, the state’s secretary of health and human services, denied that government officials were trying to make their response to the pandemic in nursing homes look better by reducing the death toll.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has come under fire after it was revealed that his government has reduced the total number of deaths in nursing homes by excluding nursing homes residents who died in hospital. Massachusetts officials say they have always included inpatients in the death toll for long-term care.
The Massachusetts case, Sudders said, is just a change of definition to be more in line with national standards. The State Department of Public Health already collects data under the new standard and submits it to the CDC, but does not place it on its widely viewed dashboard.
“We are adjusting our definition of how employees want to report deaths in long-term care, and we are joining other states,” Sudders said.
Until now, the state’s COVID-19 dashboard – which is updated every Thursday – has used a different CDC standard, the so-called definition of supervision. This includes the COVID-19 number of people who tested positive and later died, regardless of whether the virus was the cause of death.
According to the new standard, civil servants will relocate weekly death data. But they said they would maintain the previous standard for reporting overall deaths from COVID-19 in Massachusetts on the weekly dashboard. As a result, the state’s total COVID-19 mortality rate will not shrink.
Government officials have said they will include a footnote in this week’s report explaining the change. Information on long-term deaths is reported by nursing homes and other facilities themselves.
On the state’s daily COVID-19 dashboards, an even higher figure was suffered for death care during long-term care – 9,018 deaths as of Wednesday. Government officials said the daily data, which was removed from the dashboard on Thursday, uses an ‘extended’ definition collected from death certificates.
Two independent analysts tracking national COVID-19 data in long-term care facilities said the new Massachusetts standard appears to be reasonable.
“It makes a lot of sense to reflect what the CDC is doing,” said David Grabowski, a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School. Some states coronavirus sites early in the pandemic compared to the “Wild West” of data reports.
“If a person had COVID and he died six or nine months later, is it a COVID death?” he said. “I tend not to think.”
However, Grabowski said that prolonged symptoms suffering among some who recovered from COVID-19, as well as loneliness and isolation from families, probably contributed to many deaths in the nursing home that were not directly attributed to the virus.
Priya Chidambaram, a senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said several other states, including Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa, have changed the way they report deaths during long-term care, due to the pandemic, which sometimes increases their death toll. and sometimes lower it.
“It sounds like Massachusetts wants to be able to compare their data with other states,” she said. “But there’s still a lot of variation in the way states report their data, so it’s not clear that Massachusetts will be able to do that right away.”
Representative Ruth Balser, a Newton Democrat who was the main sponsor of legislation that now requires more transparent state reporting on COVID-19 deaths to nursing homes, said she understands the purpose of states reporting deaths in the same way .
But Balser said she has questions about the state’s change.
“Our goal in the legislature was to know who got COVID-19 in the nursing home and died from it,” she said. “So I’m cautious when the system changes, and it makes it harder for us to understand what happened in our nursing homes.
Sudders said the change would bring Massachusetts in line with the CDC’s long-term mortality data – used by many health researchers – and with other states using its National Healthcare Safety Network Standard. She said the change is also required by a state law, Chapter 93, which was passed last summer to expand the reporting requirements and help the state respond better to groups of issues or trends.
Although the state has posted the required data elsewhere on its website, it has so far stuck to the earlier reporting system on its high-profile dashboard.
“We see it as an aging of our dashboard,” Sudders said. ‘This will enable us to be consistent with what other states report on their dashboards. The more we learn about COVID-19 in this pandemic, the more it can make our data accurate. ”
The new reporting system will also help health officials closely monitor the effects of COVID in a well-vaccinated but vulnerable population in the coming months, said Dr. Catherine Brown, state epidemiologist at the DPH, said.
Early in the pandemic, she said, “the feeling was that it was important to cast a broad net” to assess the spread of the virus on senior sites, Brown said. However, the state now needs more precision to track down the tragic impact of COVID-19.
“Every life lost as a result of COVID-19 is a heartbreaking tragedy and DPH is dedicated to the most accurate and up-to-date information. . . to detect this virus and understand its impact on our most vulnerable population, ”Brown said.
Robert Weisman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW. Kay Lazar can be reached at [email protected] Follow her on Twitter @GlobeKayLazar.