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Nursing home residents account for 34% of Michigan's COVID-19-related deaths

Detroit Free Press - 6/15/2020

Nursing home patients account for 34% of Michigan's COVID-19 related deaths, according to newly released data.

There have been 1,947 deaths of nursing home residents with COVID-19 statewide and 20 deaths of staffers, the state reported Monday, as it released data on deaths associated with individual nursing homes for the first time since the pandemic began three months ago.

Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties account for 72% of those deaths.There have been 377 deaths of nursing home residents in Macomb County, 307 in Oakland County and 710 in Wayne County, which includes Detroit.

Michigan has had 5,772 deaths overall attributed to the coronavirus and more than 60,000 confirmed cases as of Monday.

Overall, there have been 7,163 confirmed cases of the coronavirus among nursing home residents and 3,133 confirmed cases among staff.

State health department spokeswoman Lynn Sutfin said in an email that facilities are self-reporting numbers.

Late last month, the state started providing cumulative coronavirus cases broken down by nursing home.

Other long-term care facilities, including assisted living facilities, adult foster care facilities and homes for the aged started reporting COVID-19 case information to the state May 29, Sutfin said.

"At this time, there are no plans to publish this information," she said in an email Friday. "We need to undergo considerable data quality reviews and conduct various validation exercises before posting information for these other facilities. Additionally, due to the small size of many of these facilities, there are additional concerns and legal issues to work through prior to determining the information that could be made publicly available."

She said the state health department has be focusing on data clean up and validation needed to provide additional nursing home data publicly.

Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a statewide breakdown of COVID-19-related nursing home deaths by facility. Some of those numbers were substantially higher than they should be, officials at several nursing homes told the Free Press.

Because of that, the true count of how many Michigan nursing home residents died after contracting COVID-19 remained unclear.

The federal agency said it made the data public as quickly as possible "balancing transparency and speed against the potential of initial data errors."

Contact Elisha Anderson: eanderson@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @elishaanderson

Contact Kristi Tanner: ktanner@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @MIdatalove

Contact Gina Kaufman: gkaufman@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @ReporterGina

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Nursing home residents account for 34% of Michigan's COVID-19-related deaths

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