Florida’s omicron winter hit nursing homes hard, with the number of weekly infections reported among residents and staff reaching record highs in mid-January.
But despite reporting more cases for a single week in mid-January than at any other point in the pandemic, Florida nursing homes are not seeing a corresponding spike in deaths — the cumulative effect, experts say, of immunity from vaccines and prior illness with COVID-19, hard-won experience with infection control, and new therapies that reduce the severity of disease.
“The fact that there were not more deaths is probably due to vaccination and the fact that many people had it before, and the nursing homes knowing what to do, having procedures they didn’t have when this started concerning PPE [personal protective equipment] and who to isolate and when and how,” said Lindsay Peterson, a researcher with the University of South Florida’s School of Aging Studies.
