Justin Fox, Columnist

Nursing Homes Are Only as Safe as Their Communities

Facilities for the elderly are extremely vulnerable to Covid-19, and there’s no silver bullet for protecting them.

June 29, 2020 at 1:43 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Even a hug in a nursing home requires a lot of help.
Photographer: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images

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About 2.2 million Americans, or a little under 0.7% of the country’s population, live in nursing homes and other residential-care facilities for the elderly. Residents of these facilities, meanwhile, have by some estimates accounted for more than 40% of U.S. deaths from Covid-19.

This “astounding share of deaths,” as conservative health-policy expert Avik Roy described it last month, has raised lots of questions about whether a different approach to managing the disease in the U.S. might have been able to spare the lives of nursing-home residents while allowing for fewer restrictions on everyone else. I don’t exactly have answers to those questions, and in truth I don’t think anyone does yet. I have collected some numbers, though, that may help put the issue in context.