Vaccine Reduced Nursing Home COVID-19 Cases

Nursing home residents and staff have been a top priority since the vaccine was first distributed.

As of Saturday 3.5 million According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), shots were being administered at a long-term care facility.

However, there are problems with the deployment of vaccines in nursing homes, and authorities have told Healthline that the problems will continue.

The CDC surveyed more than 11,000 nursing homes and skilled nursing homes that had at least one vaccination clinic between mid-December and mid-January.

researcher found This means that 78% of the population took at least one shot, while only 37% of the staff took it.

According to the CDC, people working in nursing homes and nursing homes are also vaccinated against the flu at a lower rate than other health care workers.

Why did this happen?

Experts suggest that care workers are skeptical of Shot’s functioning and do not expect the virus to easily spread from them to the people they care for.

Charlene HarringtonRN, a PhD in behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, has been studying nursing homes for 40 years.

She tells the healthline that there is no excuse for nursing home employees to refuse the vaccine..

“It’s an educational issue,” said Dr. Harrington. “Leadership in nursing homes needs to do a better job to educate staff and show them that vaccines are not dangerous.”

According to Harrington, some nursing homes offer incentives such as gift cards to persuade them to vaccinate.

She adds that all staff at these facilities need to be vaccinated for the safety of the population and themselves.

“A significant proportion of the care provided in nursing homes comes from nursing assistants who have only four weeks of education and training,” says Harrington. “These are entry-level jobs. They don’t have much information and may be quite afraid to get vaccinated.”

Dr. Deborah LehmanHealthline, a professor of clinical pediatrics and infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, says she and her colleagues are paying close attention to what’s happening in nursing homes.

She hopes it will be a good omen for all of us.

“We are all watching the numbers carefully,” Lehman said. “Nursing homes were a major factor in the early surge and accounted for most of the early cases of the epidemic. Many were very devastated early in the pandemic.”

Lehman says he encourages the decline in numbers.

“It’s likely that the virus destroyed them early and left them untouched,” she said. “They also learned early on the importance of infection control against this particularly infectious aerial virus, so do not allow outside visitors, aggressive testing, and other very strict rules. So I was able to reduce the number of infections. “

Dr. William SchaffnerAn infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, is also encouraged by this decline.

“I’m optimistic that the reduction in COVID-19 cases in nursing homes is primarily the result of vaccination,” Schaffner told Healthline. “Therefore, increased vaccination of the general public will also lead to a reduction in cases. Since nursing homes are a well-defined and closed population, the reduction in cases is easy to measure. It may take longer for the number of cases to decrease. “

Lehman says she and her colleagues will watch the development carefully.

“We are now past the holiday surge, so we expect fewer numbers,” she said. “It’s an important factor in hoping that we will continue to show decline with the start of some vaccine protection. Please refrain from the Super Bowl party.”

Regarding the fact that many nursery workers do not choose vaccines, Lehman said: “It’s very disappointing, especially given what we’ve seen over the past year. I think we need to do a better job dealing with vaccine repellent, especially among healthcare professionals.”