The pandemic revealed flaws in the government’s classification system.
State health inspections do little to penalize homes with poor records of infection prevention and control. From 2017 to 2019, The Times found, inspectors cited nearly 60 percent – more than 2,000 – of the country’s five-star facilities at least once for failing to follow basic safety precautions, such as washing their hands regularly. Still, they achieved maximum ratings.
In San Bernardino, California, inspectors reported Del Rosa Villa for four different infections control violations. He kept his five stars. Ninety residents at the 104-bed facility contracted the coronavirus and 13 died.
Del Rosa Villa officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The Life Care Centers of Kirkland, Wash., The first nursing home in the United States to have documented cases of coronavirus, was discovered in 2019 as having weak infection controls, despite its five stars. State inspectors wrote for failing to “consistently implement an effective infection control program”.
Thirty-nine residents of the facility died from Covid-19. The house has 190 beds.
Leigh Atherton, a spokesman for Life Care, said the citation was the only lapse in infection control that inspectors identified on 32 previous visits. She said the house resolved the problem quickly.
Forty-one deaths
If the classification system worked as planned, it would have offered clues as to which houses were most likely to have uncontrolled outbreaks and which houses were likely to be eliminated.
This is not what happened.
The Times found that there was little or no correlation between star ratings and household performance during the pandemic. In five-star facilities, the Covid-19 death rate was only half a percentage point lower than in facilities that received lower ratings. And the death rate was slightly lower in two-star facilities than in four-star homes.
The location of a facility, the infection rate of the surrounding community, and the race of nursing home residents were predictors of whether a health facility would experience an outbreak. The star rating didn’t matter.