Elvis » 19 Nov 2024 02:49 wrote:stickdog99 wrote:you still support closing schools for two years to save Grandma?
I never "supported" anything like that or leapt to conclusions about it one way or another. I'm extremely wary of absolutist pandemic narratives.
And thus, all the authoritarian responses whose individual and societal costs far exceeded their benefits that you and hundreds of millions like you never stopped to question due to your then outsized fear of COVID are magically swept away!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8776351/
Nursing home quality, COVID-19 deaths, and excess mortality
Preventing COVID-19 cases and deaths may come at some cost, as high-quality homes have substantially higher non-COVID deaths.
The positive correlation between establishment quality and non-COVID mortality is strong enough that high-quality homes also have more total deaths than their low-quality counterparts and this relationship has grown with time.
As of late April 2021, five-star homes have experienced 8.4 percent more total deaths than one-star homes.
...
To investigate this claim, we return to our original model, but change the dependent variable from COVID-19 deaths to non-COVID deaths. We find that higher-quality nursing homes have much higher non-COVID mortality. In particular, as of September 13th, 2020, five-star homes had experienced 11.4 percent more non-COVID deaths than one-star homes, all else equal; by April 15, 2021, this figure had grown to nearly 15 percent.
Research by Levere et al. (2020) suggests that these excess deaths likely resulted from isolation and loneliness. Using resident-level assessment data from Connecticut nursing homes, the authors document substantial weight loss and increases in severe pressure ulcers among residents who did not contract COVID-19.
The resident survey mentioned above also documents severe isolation, finding that only 5 percent of respondents had visitors three or more times per week, compared to 56 percent before the pandemic, and just 13 percent reported dining in a communal setting, compared to 69 percent before the pandemic.
Another possibly is that resident contact restrictions may coincide with, or even cause, a reduction in interactions with healthcare providers, both inside and outside the home, which would be consistent with widely documented reductions in healthcare receipt overall during the early stages of the pandemic (Bosworth et al., 2020; Ziedan et al., 2020; Cantor et al., 2020; Clemens et al., 2021).
...
The COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique challenge for nursing homes. Early CMS directives and various state regulations for nursing homes prioritized reducing resident and staff exposure to COVID-19.
There was little discussion about the downside risks associated with reducing visitors, communal activities, and resident travel out of the home.
Our results suggest that more balanced policies and guidelines that emphasize maximizing the health of residents, rather than just minimizing risk to one disease, may have improved outcomes.
For a period of time, CMS and the news media at large measured nursing home COVID-19 performance using cases and deaths only, meaning the logical response on the part of the nursing home was to minimize these counts regardless of the cost.
In retrospect, the tone of the discussion and the measurement of outcomes may have led to some deadly consequences. As economists continually stresses, there are benefits and costs to all regulations.
Whoops! So the lockdowns we supported actually killed Grandma! Well, who really cares? I'm extremely wary of absolutist pandemic narratives.
