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Aged Care, Nursing Homes, and the Covid-19 Pandemic
What we know about Covid-19 death rates in elderly people
This article is based on an excellent review my colleague Prof. Andrew Levin and team published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, looking at the impact of aged care facilities and the pandemic.
One of the biggest findings throughout the pandemic has centred around the age-related risk of Covid-19. In fact, we ran a study proving way back in 2020 that the risk of death from Covid-19 increases exponentially by age — in other words, someone who is aged 60 is at a roughly 10x increased risk of death compared to someone aged 40, but roughly 10x less likely to die than someone aged 80.
However, there has been a big question remaining as the pandemic moved on — what about aged care? Yes, elderly people were more likely to die, but we didn’t look at aged care in our study, and perhaps this relationship is more to do with issues with aged care than it is about the death rate of Covid-19 per se. People have suggested that the dreaded disease is, in fact, not a problem at all for anyone either young or healthy enough to not live in a nursing home.
