Nursing homes and their occupants were on the bleeding edges in the fight against Coronavirus.
However, despite the fact that residents of nursing homes are at risk for severe illness and death from the disease, the majority of them never received life-saving medications, such as Paxlovid, which was approved in May of this year by the Food and Drug Administration after being widely used for more than a year under the Emergency Use Authorization.
To combat the deadly disease, less than 18% of COVID-19-infected nursing home residents received antiviral or monoclonal antibody medications.
According to a press release, the authors of the new study referred to the low use of COVID-19 medications as “particularly alarming.”
The specialists analyzed records from May 2021 to December 2022, during which there were 763,340 Coronavirus cases in 15,092 nursing homes across the US.
However, only 136,066 of those elderly patients, or 17.8%, received the potentially life-saving medications.
Maybe more stunning is the way that toward the finish of 2022, over 40% of nursing homes had never utilized any of the accessible antiviral medicines.
According to the findings of the study, for-profit nursing homes “were… lower quality facilities” and those “with higher shares of Medicaid and non-white residents were less likely to use potentially life-saving antivirals.”
These terrible realities were “probable adding to differences in Coronavirus hospitalizations and passings.”
Experts from Harvard University and the University of Rochester Medical Center led the research, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Nursing home occupants — particularly those in New York state — fared ineffectively during the Coronavirus pandemic.
In mid 2020, during the organization of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York Branch of Wellbeing gave an order that necessary nursing homes to readmit occupants who tried positive for the Covid.
According to a report from the New York State Bar Association, the now-infamous directive forced elderly people who were sick into facilities that housed people who were most at risk for COVID-19, which led to an increase in the number of deaths among the residents.
In May of this year, members of the US House of Representatives investigating the COVID-19 pandemic wrote to Cuomo asking him to testify about why he sent coronavirus patients to nursing homes during the outbreak’s height.
