Medicare chief says “significant deficiencies in infection control practices” in nursing homes have doubled weekly COVID-19 cases, but “this isn’t a time of fines and being punitive.”
By Susan Jaffe | Contributing Writer | MedPageToday | August 20, 2020
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wants nursing homes to ramp up efforts to control COVID-19 inside facilities after the number of residents infected with the highly contagious virus has reached a record high, and as new deaths have started rising once again.
In the early spring, the number of virus cases in nursing homes was about 11,000 a week, which dropped to 6,319 cases by the end of June, CMS Aministrator Seema Verma told facility operators last week in a conference call. But CMS strike force teams have found “significant deficiencies in infection control practices” that have pushed up weekly cases to about 12,000 by the end of July, she said. “And we’re seeing an uptick unfortunately in the losses.”
Residents in about half the nation’s nursing homes have been infected, Verma told MedPage Today in an exclusive interview on Tuesday. [Continued here.]