Nursing homes account for more than 40 percent of U.S. coronavirus deaths, analysis shows

Nursing home facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
(Image credit: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

Residents and staffers at nursing homes and long-term care facilities have accounted for more than 250,000 coronavirus infections and 50,000 deaths in the United States since the pandemic began, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.

Overall, Johns Hopkins University has tallied more than 116,000 COVID-19 deaths in the country, and more than 40 percent of the virus' death toll is linked to nursing homes. That's probably an underestimate, the Journal notes, since there's a lack of consistency in state reporting when it comes to nursing home-specific data. Arizona, for example, only reports the number of facilities with infections, leaving out the number of cases and deaths, and New York doesn't include nursing home residents who died in a hospital to avoid double counting.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.