A USA TODAY investigation exposes nursing home failures during COVID

COVID-19 marched into almost every nursing home in America during last winter’s surge, when 71,000 residents died – the most of any wave of the pandemic. Still, at nearly one-third of the nursing homes reporting outbreaks, no one died. Which facilities fared better or worse, and why? USA TODAY reporters spent a year seeking answers in the data and the documents, in interviews with industry experts, government overseers, nursing home workers and families of the dead. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, they identified nursing home ownership webs invisible to consumers. They scored the performance of every nursing home in America to probe questions of corporate responsibility left unanswered by government regulators and dozens of research papers on the pandemic’s 140,000-plus nursing home deaths. When the nursing home industry blamed some of their difficulties on staff shortages caused by the pandemic, reporters turned their attention to nursing home staffing, once again finding issues that began long before COVID-19 and continue today.
The deaths across a scattering of Midwestern nursing homes began surging around Thanksgiving 2020. In the span of a week, the count of the dead nearly tripled in Michigan. Then residents started dying by the dozen in Ohio and Indiana. By Valentine’s Day 2021, the death toll had climbed into the hundreds. Read more
How deadly was COVID-19 in your nearby nursing homes? Until now, consumers could not know. USA TODAY compiled data filed by more than 15,000 homes and, for the first time, published indicators of how each fared during a five-month surge of COVID-19 infections and deaths that started in October 2020. Search our database here
Regulators have allowed thousands of nursing homes across America to flout federal staffing rules by going an entire day and night without a registered nurse on duty. Nearly all of them got away with it. Read more
Read about a first-ever USA TODAY analysis of the eldercare business that shows how pervasive failures escaped notice during the pandemic. Read more
Choosing a nursing home for a loved one can be daunting and time-consuming. Experts break it down, beginning with deciding whether a nursing home is the right fit, or whether this is the right time. Read more
The nation’s first major COVID-19 outbreak in a nursing home outside Seattle warned that authorities would need to closely monitor the pandemic’s impact on the medically vulnerable. But a seemingly simple question – how many nursing home residents have gotten sick and died – has often turned into a political minefield. Read more
Daily COVID-19 statistics, graphs, maps and news reports can obscure the grief and hardship facing the families of those who died. USA TODAY Network reporters contacted dozens of families whose loved ones died in the care of a Trilogy Health Services home to learn more about their lives. Read more
Families and workers share their experiences with Trilogy Health Services, whose own reported death rate came in at twice the national average during the winter 2020-21 surge. The company told USA TODAY it had mistakenly logged hundreds of deaths and is revising them. Watch
USA TODAY is remembering those who died of coronavirus in nursing homes, where the pandemic took its greatest toll. Read more
Go behind the scenes of a yearlong probe into the cutthroat world of elder care and real estate trust-backed nursing homes. Explore the data