Moving into the holiday season — and the so-called “tripledemic” of COVID-19/flu/RSV — less than half of nursing home residents and less than a quarter of staff were up to date with COVID-19 vaccines, a new study found. KFF found that only 45% of nursing home residents and 22% of staff were up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as of Nov. 20, the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Vaccination rates among residents ranged from a low of 24% in Arizona to a high of 73% in South Dakota. For staff, Alabama scored the lowest at 10%, while California came in the highest at 48%.
“We expected to see some drop in vaccination rates, but rates this low were surprising,” said Priya Chidambaram, KFF’s senior policy analyst with the program on Medicaid and the uninsured. This is concerning because people in nursing facilities are at higher risk of having worse outcomes if infected with COVID-19 and one-fifth of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths occurred among residents and staff in long-term-care facilities, KFF said. “The implications are increased mortality and more severe infections that could lead to long COVID among nursing facility residents. Death and severe sickness at a time when hospital capacity is just not there. For the staff, the repercussions are potentially infecting residents or getting sick and creating staffing shortages,” Chidambaram said. Read: ‘This isn’t just gonna go away’: Long COVID is …