This plays into a thought that has been bouncing around in my head. The majority of these group homes are nursing homes, and thus elderly.
I’m thinking that the perception that this is mostly a problem for the elderly, and not as big a problem for younger people may just be incorrect - that the statistics showing that it is mostly elderly is badly skewed by the fact that the elderly are far more likely to be in a situation where they are more likely to be exposed to it.
The fact that elderly people are conveniently locked up together no doubt puts their fatality numbers higher. However, if you get sent to a hospital and you’re elderly, you’re more likely to die.
A test of your basic idea might be to look up whether there is a significantly higher fatality rate amongst prisoners. Also locked up, same staff serving everyone, communal eating areas. I don’t remember hearing that to be true but haven’t looked into it.
Here’s a report on Covid-19 in prisons:
As of 7-9, there were at least 651 deaths due to covid-19. I don’t know how that stacks up re: % of people in prison
There’s about 1.5M people in state/federal prisons.
Wanted to add: But that is not quite the way to look at it unless you look up the total population in nursing homes to compare it to. 650 total sure looks low, though.
Lansing Correctional Facility (Kansas) had a major outbreak back in April into May: 96 staff and 850 inmates tested positive. That’s close to half of the inmate population (capacity is 2432, but they’ve been running closer to 1700 to 1900 residents recently, with yesterday’s census at 1683). Of those, two staff and four inmates died.
Of the four inmates, all were over the age of 50, including at least two over 60. Only about a quarter of Lansing’s inmates are over 50 (428 of 1683, currently).
The two staff members were men aged 59 and 61, although I don’t know the total number or demographics of the staff there.
About 1.3 million nursing home residents per the CDC (albeit 2015 numbers quoted). Yeah that under 700 deaths related to COVID-19 in prisons seems small.
Nursing homes though are a higher risk for exposure environment than prisons are. More close (within 6 feet for more than 15 minutes) contact with staff coming in from the outside in nursing homes than in prisons, and more staff that have that close contact with a much larger number of individuals.
I’d suspect that there are both many more nursing home residents becoming infected (due to exposures that hopefully will be prevented in the future by improved practices) and of course a much higher death rate per infection .
At 57K that’s roughly 4% of the prison population with confirmed infections. Five times as much the general U.S. population. Fewer missed cases (estimates are true cases in the country have been over ten times the number of confirmed) or more infections?
The best guess is that only about half of Covid-19 deaths have been reported. Ones that happen in an elderly home are more likely to be reported since it will be a major outbreak.
But, it’s probably the case that the unreported deaths are also, in majority, the elderly.
At 90 years old, you’re still more likely to survive getting Covid-19 than you are to die (not to say that you should try it out). But, if you’re merely suffering an underlying illness like diabetes, your odds of dying are still much lower than if you were old. Age causes you to get secondary/underlying conditions. It’s the combo of the two - age and underlying illness - that really puts you at risk. And, as said, those tend to come together, hand in hand.
The best metric for whether you’re going to die from Covid-19 is how close you were to death, minus Covid-19. Generally, that’s the elderly. But probably you could look at most of the younger patients who would be at high risk and, visually, be able to determine that they’re at risk - because they’ve had their heads go bald from chemo, they’re coughing and living on the streets, etc.
I’d venture to guess that the next highest locations of death, after elderly facilities are hospitals and homeless shelters.
The risk to your average person of death by Covid-19 are, despite Trump saying it, no worse than a normal flu.
Lompoc Federal Prison has 1,526 total inmates. Of these, 998 (!) tested positive for covid-19. 3 have died. So yeah, a much smaller percentage than nursing homes have been reporting.
Breakdown by age of those who tested positive in this prison:
18-29 134
30-49 530
50-69 302
70+ 32
Ummm, I think that’s probably not true:
Another story from the ACLU:
Which notes that Residents of these congregate facilities are dying from COVID-19 at 8.6 times the rate of the overall 75+ population.
So, no, it’s not just because they’re old, and if anything, the nursing home deaths are probably getting under-reported.
Nursing home residents are probably more likely to be sicker than their contemporaries who are still in the community, and I’d wonder if more of them have living wills or DNR orders or have otherwise expressed “no extraordinary measures” or “palliative care only.”
(Also note that your Indiana link is talking about discrepancies between reported federal and state numbers, rather than unreported deaths.)
That statement is highly misleading, because even if we assume that the chance of death given COVID infection is roughly equal to the chance of death given a flu, MANY more people will become infected with Coronavirus than would get the flu. So the risk to your average person is much higher from Coronavirus even if, once the average person catches either the flu or COVID, the risk is equal.