Just over 6 percent of residents and patients in Virginia nursing homes have been confirmed as having COVID-19.
This data point comes from looking at two sources: one reliable, one close to reliable.
The reliable: the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association dashboard reports today that there are currently 1,667 residents and patients in Virginia licensed nursing homes who are either confirmed or awaiting confirmation of their COVID-19 status.
The close to reliable: several Google searches trying to pinpoint how many people are residents and patients in Virginia licensed nursing homes went down several dead-end roads, until we got to this, from kff.org, which only has data current to 2017.
A look at a several-year trend at kff.org puts the Virginia licensed nursing home population in the area of 27,000, on either side.
Which is how we get to our around 6 percent figure in terms of COVID-19 impact in nursing homes.
How does this compare to the general population?
The Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard lists a cumulative 39,342 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of this morning.
Take the 1,667 in nursing homes out, divide by the state’s 8.5 million population, and you get: .4 percent of the rest of the population confirmed with COVID.
Residents and patients in nursing homes are, thus, roughly 15 times more likely to be confirmed with COVID-19 than the general population.
Which correlates to the roughly 10-fold increased likelihood of death among residents in nursing homes who contract COVID relative to the general population.
Story by Chris Graham
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