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On Thursday, ProPublica added staff COVID-19 vaccination data to the Nursing Home Inspect project.
The virus has killed more than 150,000 nursing home residents and staff since the beginning of the pandemic. Experts say that staff vaccination is a key part of protecting residents from outbreaks in their homes, but thousands of workers remain unvaccinated despite a federal COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health care employees. Some of those unvaccinated workers are claiming medical exemptions, which doctors say should be rare.
Nursing Home Inspect already lets the public, researchers and reporters search deficiency reports and other data across more than 15,000 nursing homes in the United States. Now, users can quickly compare staff COVID-19 vaccination and booster rates across states and between nursing homes.
Each state page allows users to sort homes by vaccination rate, making it easy to identify homes in your state with very low or very high vaccination rates. For each nursing home, a chart allows users to see how the home compares with both state and national averages.
Additionally, we have removed the COVID-19 case and death count data from the database because the figures were reported cumulatively and do not provide an accurate picture of recent outbreaks.
If you write a story using this new information, or you come across bugs or problems, please let us know!