On 26 June, Dr Adelina Comas-Herrera and colleagues published an updated report on the mortality associated with COVID-19 outbreaks in care homes, summarising and contrasting international data on deaths in care homes due to COVID-19. The report, updated from an April version with data from a larger number of countries, was published on the website of the International Long-Term Care Policy Network.
The COVID-19 pandemic has expanded rapidly across the globe, with over 10 million cases and 502,000 deaths reported to date. An increasing number of countries are now publishing data on the number of deaths among care home residents. With the caveat that direct data comparisons are difficult, due in part to inter-country differences in how ‘care homes’ are defined and COVID-19 data are managed, the report aimed to evaluate the relative impact of COVID-19 on care home residents in different countries.
Summarising data from 26 countries across the world, including 13 EU countries, the report shows that, on average, 47% of COVID-19 deaths to date have occurred in the care home setting. The researchers observed some variation in proportion of COVID-19 deaths within care homes, ranging from 81% in Slovenia (85 of 105 total deaths) to 24% in Hungary (127 of 532 total deaths) and 0% (0 of 9 total deaths) in Malta. Similarly, high levels of variability were observed in the proportion of care home deaths attributed to COVID-19. For example, 0.2% of care home residents in Hungary are reported to have died due to COVID-19, while in Spain and in the UK almost 6.1% and 5.3% of care home residents may have died as a direct or indirect result of COVID-19. These figures are strongly correlated with the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the whole population. The authors will continue to issue updates to the report as further data becomes available.
The report can be found here: https://ltccovid.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mortality-associated-with-COVID-among-people-who-use-LTC-26-June-2020-2.pdf
