Nursing Home COVID-19 Data are Getting Better
Alex Brill and Benedic Ippolito | AEIdeas
A large share of total COVID-19 deaths in the United States have occurred in nursing homes, prompting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to begin reporting facility-level data on COVID-19 rates at nursing homes. As discussed in a recent blog post and in media reports, however, the initial data contained meaningful errors that could undermine efforts to better understand the drivers of nursing home outbreaks. Acknowledging these submission errors, CMS updated and revised these data earlier this week. Here, we quantify the data improvements and illustrate how they change our understanding of COVID-19 in these facilities.