Most states, nursing homes fail to meet White House coronavirus recommendations

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NY, NJ lawmakers want probes into how states handled COVID-19 in nursing homes

Over 10,000 people have died in nursing homes or long-term care centers in New York and New Jersey; correspondent Bryan Llenas reports from Queens.

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The majority of nursing homes in the United States failed to meet the White House-mandated deadline to test all staff and residents by Sunday for the novel coronavirus, according to the nation’s largest long term care association.

Citing a lack of supplies and the time it takes to process the tests, the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living said that more than 60 percent of assisted living facilities across the country were unable to meet the White House’s deadline due to lack of access to testing. The White House gave nursing homes two weeks to carry out the tests.

“Most states and facilities were not able to meet this timeline due to a lack of access to either swabs or tests and the time it takes to process results, but they are working as best they can with the resources they’ve been given,” the organization said in a statement to Fox News.

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A national survey by the association conducted in early May found that more than 60 percent of nursing homes were unable to test all residents and staff in their building within two weeks due to this lack of access to testing. To test all nursing home residents and staff members in that time frame once, the organization said it would need almost three million tests, costing nearly $440 million.

“We cannot do this alone,” the statement continued. “We need a collective effort from the public and private sectors to support long term care providers in expanding testing.”

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Nursing homes have increasingly come to the forefront of the coronavirus pandemic as the contagion has wreaked havoc on the facilities – leaving thousands of residents dead and questions being asked about how this tragedy could have been prevented.

About 1.4 million people live in some 15,500 facilities in the United States. Most of those people were already at higher risk due to age and medical history, and they also shared dining rooms, recreation areas, bathrooms and sleeping quarters.

An ongoing count by The Associated Press has found that outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities have killed more than 30,000 people, more than one-third of all coronavirus deaths in the country. New York, as with much of the other grim news from the outbreak, has been the epicenter of deaths in nursing homes with more than 5,000 being reported as of last week.

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A Government Accountability Office report released last week, which analyzed data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from 2013 to 2017, found that 82 percent of nursing homes – over 13,000 in all – had received citations for either cutting corners or failing to implement to correct controls in that time frame.

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“Our analysis of CMS data shows that infection prevention and control deficiencies were the most common type of deficiency cited in surveyed nursing homes,” John Dicken, the director of the healthcare team at the GAO wrote in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on a committee that oversees Medicare and Medicaid.

“Infection prevention and control deficiencies cited by surveyors can include situations where nursing home staff did not regularly use proper hand hygiene or failed to implement preventive measures during an infectious disease outbreak, such as isolating sick residents and using masks and other personal protective equipment to control the spread of infection."

Dicken added: “Many of these practices can be critical to preventing the spread of infectious diseases, including COVID19.”

Fox News’ Bryan Llenas contributed to this report.