A nursing home in Connecticut was going to give Covid booster shots to its residents.
The Geer Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in North Canaan was the site of an outbreak of the coronaviruses that killed 89 people. Most of them were fully vaccine free.
According to the home, all of the residents had serious underlying health issues.
The severity of the outbreak helped spur Connecticut officials to announce that they would set up booster clinics at all of its nursing homes to cover the facilities that had yet to receive additional doses.
The Midwest and the Northeast are seeing a lot of new Covid cases. Despite a monthslong vaccination rate of 86 percent among residents in skilled nursing facilities, there have been fresh outbreaks this month at nursing homes in Vermont, Virginia and elsewhere.
According to federal data, there are nearly 4,000 new Covid cases reported every week in nursing homes, and experts say many of the cases are occurring in homes that have yet to administer the extra doses.
The director of the Centers said that the rate of Covid-19 disease is lower for those who received a booster dose than for those who did not.
In some places, an outbreak may still be occurring because nursing home staff vaccination rates lag behind national averages.
Health experts said that the booster roll out has been slow and piecemeal. According to federal reports, 42 percent of Americans over the age of 65 have received a booster shot.
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Medics transported a man with possible Covid symptoms from a senior living center in Houston to a hospital in August.
The Covid death toll at nursing homes in 2020 should have made boosters for older Americans a top priority after the successful vaccine campaign and a steady rise in cases this fall.
The lack of data and attention on nursing homes this time around has been surprising, according to the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. He noted that nursing home residents were among the first to receive the vaccines, so the government should have authorized additional doses earlier.
The data was clear at that point. The elderly were seeing waning immunity.
In August, third doses of some vaccines were authorized for people with weakened immune systems. Many nursing home residents had already lost some of their initial protection against infections when the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved in late September. They were more vulnerable to serious disease because of their age.
David Grabowski, a health policy professor at Harvard who studies nursing homes, said that six months for them was a lot earlier than six months for the general population. He said that residents of assisted living facilities are at risk because of a lack of a strategy. Booster programs are put on hold until the cases are over.
The vaccine effort last winter was done by two drugstore chains. When the federal contracts ended, nursing homes reverted to relying on the pharmacy that they usually use to give the flu vaccine.
The Biden administration said it had succeeded in getting the additional doses to residents. Sonya Bernstein is a senior White House adviser on Covid. She said that programs in West Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina are robust.
Other areas have also been able to provide booster coverage. In November, Los Angeles County announced that nearly all the residents in skilled nursing facilities had received booster shots.
Ms. Bernstein said that the federal government was working with facilities that can't find a pharmacy. Any long-term care facility that needs help is being matched with one of our partners.
Public health officials said in a recent announcement that half of those 65 and older who were eligible for the vaccine have received it. It took nearly three months to deliver half of the first dose to this group.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which reports vaccination rates nationwide and for individual facilities on its website, said it planned to post data on boosters within the next two weeks and allow consumers to compare individual nursing homes.
The agency said that it is working with nursing homes to increase Covid-19 booster take.
Pharmacy helping nursing homes have not experienced any problems. The chief executive of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists said that they had not heard of any delays or concerns. The vaccine is in demand.
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The Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx gave staff members booster shots.
The number of booster shots that were delivered to nursing homes was not available from the pharmacy. T.J. Crawford, a spokesman, said that they have seen strong interest from long-term care customers.
Some nursing homes still have large numbers of unvaccinated workers, despite the fact that the average staff vaccination rate has now reached 74 percent. The federal mandate to immunize staff is close to being implemented.
Staffing shortages are a problem for many facilities. The decision by C.M.S. to require nursing homes to allow unrestricted access to residents is complicating their efforts. The announcement that all residents would be allowed to visit at all times caught some people off guard.
According to a report by The Star Tribune, only a fifth of nursing home residents in Minnesota had received boosters by early November. State health officials didn't comment.
400 members of the Minnesota National Guard were deployed to nursing homes in the state to help with the shortage of workers.
The American Health Care Association said the booster roll out was going well.
The association said that on-site clinics take a bit of time to plan and prepare.
The association said it would take about another month to see a large portion of residents and staff boosted after approval for booster shots.
The current outbreak is seen by many as evidence of the need to move quickly. Scott LaRue, the chief executive of ArchCare, said that 93 percent of the residents have received their booster shots.
It is too late to plan for the future if you want to save lives. You need to get the residents and staff immunizations. It is a life or death matter.
Brendan Williams, the chief executive of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, said that booster shots in nursing homes couldn't have arrived too soon. He said that everything happening right now is an advertisement for booster shots.
