12 April 2021: NY Nursing Home Workers Skipping COVID Vaccines

State figures: New York nursing home staff lagging in getting COVID-19 vaccine

This report decries the failure of nursing home staff members to get vaccinated for COVID-19, despite being at the front of the line for programs to receive the vaccines to help protect the residents of nursing homes, who have proven to be the most vulnerable population to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection.

More than 40% of nursing home employees in the state remain unvaccinated for COVID-19, despite an aggressive effort to offer residents and staff of those facilities a chance to get the vaccine before most other New Yorkers could do so.

The vaccination level among staff at those facilities falls well short of the 75% of health care workers who are fully vaccinated, according to the latest state figures.

We hate it when reporters flub reporting numbers as in this example, because it reveals they neither understand what they're reporting nor how to clearly communicate it.

Let's restate the figures so we can directly compare apples to apples and fix the flawed reporting. The article later reports 58% of nursing home employees in New York have been vaccinated for COVID-19. That compares with 75% of health care workers in the state who have been vaccinated.

Now, let's do some original analysis. According to the New York Department of Health's data for influenza vaccination rates for health care personnel, the state of New York had 2,387,570 health care workers and 404,140 nursing home workers in 2018-2019.

Assuming these employment levels are consistent with today's employment in these fields, that would mean 1,790,678 health care workers and 234,401 nursing home workers have received COVID-19 vaccines. That leaves 596,892 health care workers and 169,739 nursing home workers have not been vaccinated for COVID-19.

The article also fails in explaining why nursing home workers are underrepresented among all health care workers in getting vaccinated:

"We still have a lot of employees who are skeptical for a number of reasons," said Ken Knutsen, administrator at Huntington Hills Center for Health and Rehabilitation in Melville, which has vaccinated about 50% of its staff.

The reasons are not entirely known, but Knutsen said those workers are not immune to the doubts that have fed vaccine hesitancy in the overall population.

"Some have bought into paranoia, yes," Knutsen said. " … But through education, we are slowly turning this around."

Nursing homes were hard hit during the height of the pandemic, with more than 6,000 coronavirus deaths confirmed by the state in those facilities as of April 5 and allegations of underreporting the death toll unleashing controversy for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. More than 4,000 nursing home residents died of COVID-19 outside the facilities, including in hospitals, according to state figures.

The New York Department of Health's 6 July 2020 report, which was "doctored" to conceal the full extent of nursing home resident deaths in New York, blamed nursing home workers for spreading coronavirus infections within the facilities where they worked.