The benefits of having more nursing home staff take COVID-19 vaccines faded as the Omicron variant took hold, a new study of some 15,000 facilities across the United States suggests.
The authors of the study, a team of researchers from the University of Chicago, sought to find out whether higher levels of staff vaccination rates were actually associated with lower adverse outcomes of COVID-19 in nursing homes. As of Dec. 19, 2022, two weeks before their paper was published online in JAMA Network Open, nursing home staff and residents accounted for nearly 2.9 million COVID-19 infections and 165,000 deaths.
“When vaccines became available in December 2020, staff and residents in nursing homes were among the first to be deemed eligible for vaccination,” the researchers wrote, noting that staff vaccination rates varied substantially by facility before the Biden administration rolled out a vaccination mandate for all health care workers in November 2021….