Los Angeles County’s nursing homes have observed an extraordinary increase in coronavirus case rates during the Omicron surge — reaching levels exceeding even last winter’s wave — but that unprecedented torrent of infections hasn’t been matched by a record-high number of daily COVID-19 deaths, county health data show.
The county has instead observed a relatively small increase in daily COVID-19 deaths at nursing homes during the Omicron surge, officials said. And new daily coronavirus cases have already started to drop.
As of mid-January, L.A. County was tallying a daily COVID-19 death rate of 20 fatalities for every 100,000 nursing home residents. That’s about one-fifth of the peak of last winter’s surge, and roughly one-fourth the rate of the pandemic‘s early days in spring 2020, according to figures presented by L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.
“The extraordinarily high case rate has not caused a similar high increase in deaths among residents compared to our previous surges,” Ferrer said. “We attribute these lower numbers to very high vaccination rates amongst nursing home residents.”
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