In May, five Phoenix-area news outlets sued the Arizona Department of Health Services over the state’s refusal to release data on COVID-19 infections and deaths from individual nursing homes in Arizona.
Less than a week after a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Gov. Doug Ducey’s effort to keep the data from the public, a federal agency released a national database with some of the information the news outlets sought: Reported COVID-19 deaths, confirmed cases and suspected cases for Medicare-certified nursing homes in Arizona.
The new information on COVID-19 infections in individual nursing homes comes with some caveats; some nursing homes are not included in the data because they are not Medicare-certified, and not all the facilities required to send their data to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services have done so. The CMS website states that its data set comes from 88% of the certified facilities.
The data, released by CMS on June 4 and covering the start of the outbreak through May 31, suggests that Northern Arizona’s nursing facilities have generally avoided outbreaks, especially in the Verde Valley, which has not reported any suspected nor confirmed cases at its three Medicare-certified facilities.
Yavapai County nursing homes have reported only four suspected COVID-19 cases, three at the Granite Creek Health and Rehabilitation Center and one at the Prescott Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.
The Peaks Health and Rehabilitation Center in Flagstaff has one suspected COVID-19 case. In Kingman, the Desert Highlands Care Center has reported five confirmed cases.
Northern Arizona’s 10 suspected and confirmed COVID- 19 cases in nursing facilities is a small fraction of the 371 total reported for the entire state in the federal data.
Nationally, the Medicare-certified nursing homes have reported 95,515 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 31,782 deaths from the disease.
While the local data paints a picture of successful efforts to keep the virus out of Northern Arizona’s nursing homes, some epidemiologists have warned that official data is likely undercounting the actual number of COVID-19 infections across the U.S., based on comparisons between expected and actual death rates since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
Because the expected death rates account for reported COVID-19 deaths, large discrepancies between the expected and actual number implies that some people are dying from COVID-19 without having a confirmed infection. These unaccounted for bumps in the death rates are called “excess deaths.”
According to CDC data, Arizona has recorded excess deaths for five weeks since April 4. In the week ending May 9, Arizona had the largest number of excess deaths since the outbreak, with total deaths 12% to 21% higher than expected.
The CMS website states that the federal data on certified nursing homes will be updated weekly and is available for viewing at data.cms.gov.
