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A CVS pharmacist gives the Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a resident of the Emerald Court neighborhood in Anaheim, California.
Vaccinations reduce COVID-19 cases in U.S. nursing homes, a federal health official reported Thursday, a long-awaited interruption in the deadly grip of the pandemic on the most vulnerable older adults.
Nursing homes were the deadliest place for people with COVID-19 throughout the pandemic, which has so far killed more than 150,000 residents and staff. Vaccination at long-term care facilities was a high priority in the nationwide deployment of coronavirus vaccines that began in December, as COVID-19 cases reached record levels nationwide and nursing homes were locked up during the holidays. Now the vaccines are starting to make a difference, according to custom health data, accelerating a 22% drop in the nursing home’s COVID-19 cases seen from December 20 to January 10.
“We finally felt like we were reversing the holiday season,” said Lee Fleisher, chief medical and medicaid services center. He said Thursday with a vaccine advisory panel from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“What we believe is starting to show with this data is that we are now seeing the effect of both interventions, but also the vaccine.”
AHCA / Via ahcancal.org
COVID-19 cases in nursing homes (blue) dropped sharply in January compared to the general population (red).
Nursing Homes COVID-19 cases have been at the “forefront” of the U.S. epidemic since February last year, when an outbreak in a Washington state institution resulted in 46 deaths among residents, staff and visitors, which were the beginning of fatal cases that older adults. nationwide. Epidemiologist George Rutherford of the University of California, San Francisco, says a sign of the flurry of such cases due to vaccination would not be unexpected, as clinical trial data suggested a drop in vaccinations. . , but is nevertheless gratifying.
“These are really good vaccines, and we’re seeing how they work, which’s great,” Rutherford said. “The data showed that they had good efficiency even after one shot, which I suspect is what we are starting to see here.”
The evidence comes in a comparison of COVID-19 cases in the same county in 800 vaccinated competent nursing homes with 1,700 unvaccinated people released Thursday by a U.S. research center from the American Health Care Association. At a time when COVID-19 cases were declining nationwide at nursing homes, those who received their first shots in the third and fourth weeks of December had a 48% decrease from a 21% decrease in the non vaccinated, more than twice as steep falls just three weeks later in mid-January. Among staff, the new COVID-19 cases dropped more in those who held the previous vaccination clinics by 33%, compared to those who did not, who fell by 18%, in the same provinces.
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Sharper decline in the case of the percentages among facilities in the same province with earlier vaccinations.
“If confirmed with additional data, it could accelerate the reopening of long-term visitor facilities for visitors,” AHCA David Gifford said in a statement on the analysis. Even more encouraging is evidence that the vaccines help limit the spread of the virus, the association suggested.
An alternative explanation for the decline is that natural immunity among nursing home staff has increased simply due to increasing infections at the national level, Rutherford said. But that does not explain the division in the country between the cases between early and late vaccinated facilities, which better explains the shots. “This is what we were hoping to see,” he said.
The news about vaccinations starting at nursing homes comes at a crucial moment in the pandemic, with a new more transmissible variant of the virus that, according to March, will dominate CDC nationwide. A more recent report from the federal health agency found that although 78% of residents in more than 11,000 nursing homes nationwide received a first vaccine shot in the first month of implementation, only about 38% of staff did so.
A federal partnership with pharmacy chains administering vaccines in nursing homes ends in March. Because their reluctance has faded in the past, many staff members at the facilities are only now getting their first shot, Fleisher said. According to the CDC, approximately 4.2 million COVID-19 vaccine shots have been administered in U.S. long-term care facilities since Thursday, nearly 800,000 of their second doses. According to the surveys, Fleisher said, a major source of concern among staff members, many of whom are paid by the hour, is that if the vaccine causes side effects, they will miss work and lose wages.
“There’s a lot of mistrust, so we hear about the vaccines that cause infertility, sometimes also the idea of microchip insertion,” he added. “There is a lot of misinformation.”