Not just COVID: Nursing home neglect deaths surge in shadows

As more than 90,000 of the nation’s long-term care residents have died in the coronavirus pandemic, advocates for the elderly say a tandem wave of fatalities is quietly claiming tens of thousands more who are succumbing not to the virus but to neglect by overwhelmed staffs and slow declines from isolation.

Nursing home watchdogs are being flooded with reports of residents kept in soiled diapers so long their skin peeled off, left with bedsores that cut to the bone, and allowed to wither away in starvation or thirst.

Beyond that are swelling numbers of less clear-cut deaths that doctors believe have been fueled by despair and desperation from being cut off from loved ones ̶ listed on some death certificates as “failure to thrive.”

“What the pandemic did was uncover what was really going on in these facilities,” said June Linnertz, whose father died in June after she found him in what she said were putrid conditions at his Plymouth, Minnesota, assisted living facility. “It was bad before, but it got exponentially worse.”

Nursing home expert Stephen Kaye, a professor at the Institute on Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed data from 15,000 facilities for The Associated Press, finding that for every two COVID-19 victims in long-term care, there is another who died prematurely of other causes. Those “excess deaths” beyond the normal rate of fatalities in nursing homes could total more than 40,000 since March.

The more the virus spread through a home, Kaye found, the greater the level of deaths recorded for other reasons, suggesting care suffered as workers were consumed with attending to COVID-19 patients or were left short-handed as the pandemic infected employees themselves.

“The healthcare system operates kind of on the edge, just on the margin, so that if...