The Biden administration earlier in November published the details of a several new vaccine requirements.
Many health care organizations including the major hospitals in the broader region — Dayton Children’s, Kettering Health and Premier Health — already were implementing vaccination policies.
As of August, when many Ohio hospitals announced these policies, Mercy officials had said Springfield Regional Medical Center and Urbana Hospital were monitoring the situation and had not made final plans whether to have a requirement.
Sarah Hackenbracht, president and CEO of the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association, noted when Biden’s announcement was first made that under federal rules there’s no exemption for testing or antibodies from a previous infection. There are medical and religious exemptions.
“The goal is to help more people get vaccinated so that we come out on the other side of the global pandemic,” she said.
One of the significant impacts could be on local nursing homes. The facilities are both home to some of the most vulnerable residents and had health staff vaccination rates hovering around 56% as of September in Ohio after inching up for several months.
Nursing home residents overall have high vaccination rates. But when cases recently surged in the community, exploited asymptomatic carriers and unvaccinated contacts, and still got into some facilities.
About two out of every 1,000 Ohio nursing home residents died of COVID-19 from mid August to mid September, according to the latest data from AARP’s Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard, created with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University.
That’s still muted by vaccines from the height of over 33 deaths per 1,000 but also about five times as high as the summer lull.
“We want to advocate for as few risks as possible for nursing home residents and having a vaccine mandate is another way of making sure they’re protected,” Chip Wilkins, a long term care ombudsman, who advocates for the rights of residents, had said after the Biden administration released details of the vaccine requirement.
One of the key issues Wilkins advocates on is problems related staffing shortages, and he is also concerned about whether the rule will mean more staffing shortages.
“Regardless of mandates, staffing is already an issue. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen come January for that. That’s the one unknown that is concerning for all of us,” Wilkins said.
In Ohio, vaccination rates among nursing home residents and staff grew to 81.7% of residents.
The vaccine mandate is the cause of serious stress in the provider world, said Patrick Schwartz, with LeadingAge Ohio, which represents nonprofit long-term care providers.
“Many nursing facilities have already stopped new admissions because of staffing shortages, and the Department of Health has cited staffing shortages as a primary driver of quality complaints,” Schwartz said. “The long-term care sector needs public officials to give the same level of urgency to workforce issues in this sector as they have to the public health emergency.”
Nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other long-term care homes are still recovering from an early fall surge that now appears to be on the downswing.
The latest round of Ohio COVID-19 nursing home data shows that deaths, worker cases, and worker shortages all increased from July to September, before community cases started to fall.
For the four weeks before Sept. 19, Ohio nursing home resident cases increased from 6 to 19.2 per 1,000 residents, and reported new staff cases increased from 12 to nearly 30 per 1,000 residents, according to AARP’s dashboard.
A coalition of 10 states, though not including Ohio, sued the federal government on Wednesday to try to block a COVID-19 vaccine requirement for health care workers, marking a new front in the resistance by Republican-led states to the pandemic policies of President Joe Biden’s administration.
The lawsuit filed in a federal court in Missouri contends that the vaccine requirement threatens the jobs of millions of health care workers and could “exacerbate an alarming shortage” in health care fields, particularly in rural areas where some health workers have been hesitant to get the shots.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
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