Nursing Homes With Black and Latino Residents Have Much Worse Covid-19 Rates

A journalistic collaboration by reporters from The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, KPCC/LAist, and The Southern Illinoisan explores the racial divide apparent in Covid-19 rates in nursing homes around the country.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the nation’s nursing homes, sickening staff members, ravaging residents and contributing to at least 20 percent of the nation’s Covid-19 death toll. The impact has been felt in cities and suburbs, in large facilities and small, in poorly rated homes and in those with stellar marks.

But Covid-19 has been particularly virulent toward African-Americans and Latinos: Nursing homes where those groups make up a significant portion of the residents — no matter their location, no matter their size, no matter their government rating — have been twice as likely to get hit by the coronavirus as those where the population is overwhelmingly white.

Anecdotes, data, and infographics present the evidence of yet another stark racial divide in the Covid-19 pandemic, but the article also notes that the disparities in outbreaks are still confusing and hard to explain. The journalists working on this story interviewed residents of nursing homes in Maryland, California, and Illinois to reveal more about racial disparities of outbreaks in nursing homes around the country.

Additional reading: "Pandemic and the Ills of Age Segregation," (Planetizen, April 26)