Nursing homes have been ordered to disclose COVID-19 cases and deaths to residents and their families or representatives within 12 hours. The Centers for Medicare and Medicare services announced this late Sunday.
The information is also required to be reported to Centers for Disease Control to be publicized.
CMS Administrator Seema Verma said at Sunday’s White House briefing that “It’s important that patients and their families have the information that they need, and they need to understand what’s going on in the nursing home.”
Before now, nursing homes were required to report this info to state and local public health authorities, but in general, those reports have not been made public or shared with federal health officials.
In more than 41,000 nursing homes across the US, over 36,000 residents and staff members have become infected with COVID-19 and over 7,000 have died.
Unfortunately, nursing homes have been some of the hardest hit, with the majority of their residents in the most at-risk population for contracting the disease.
