In a new article published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, Mark Unruh, PhD, assistant professor of population health sciences; Hyunkyung Yun, Master of Science in population health sciences student; Yongkang Zhang, PhD, research associate in population health sciences; Robert Braun, PhD, instructor of population health sciences; and Arian Jung, PhD, assistant professor of population health sciences, note how nursing home patients have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. After analyzing data from nursing homes across Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, they found that nursing homes with higher percentages of Medicaid patients were more likely to have COVID-19 deaths, while facilities with larger percentages of white patients were less likely to have deaths associated with the virus. This is likely due to the tendency of these nursing homes to have fewer resources compared with other facilities, prompting the researchers to urge policymakers to allocate more resources to these facilities to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with COVID-19 and future infectious disease outbreaks.
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