Michigan Undercounted Nursing Home COVID-19 Deaths: Report

LANSING, MI — Michigan "wildly under-counts Covid deaths in its long term care facilities," according to a report published this week through a joint investigation by the No BS News Hour and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The report suggests that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services doesn't adequately determine whether people who died from COVID-19 were nursing home residents because it hasn't reviewed a large number of COVID-19 deaths that have been labeled "vital records."

"Moreover, our investigation found that DHHS did conduct a limited review of those vital records last summer, and found that 44 percent could be traced to nursing homes," reporter Charlie LeDuff said in the report. "Don't expect the nursing home data to get better or more accurate. DHHS has abandoned the practice of thoroughly scrubbing records because it is considered too “time-consuming.”

Read the full DeadlineDetroit report here.

Patch has reached out to state officials for comment.

According to the report, around 5,600 of Michigan's more than 19,000 COVID-19 deaths were residents of long-term-care facilities. But those deaths were reported through Michigan's honor system for COVID-19 reporting. Meanwhile, nearly 7,000 of the state's COVID-19 deaths are classified as vital records reviews and have not been examined to see if they were nursing home residents.

"Here is where the problems begin. State health officials do not attempt to determine whether the people in this “vital records” group lived in a nursing home or whether they contracted the disease there, as their own guidelines require," the report says.

According to the report, Michigan conducted a study last summer to learn how many COVID-19 deaths from the state's vital records list were people living in long-term care facilities. The results of that report indicated 1,468 vital records were selected between March through June of 2020, with 648 — or 44 percent — of those people being identified as nursing home and long-term facility residents, the report submits.

If that percentage was replicated for the 7,000 vital records deaths reported by the state, Michigan nursing home deaths would increase to 8,900, the report speculates.

"Of course, deaths in nursing homes have dropped dramatically since vaccines became widely available in January. So who knows?" the authors of the report wrote. "But that's the point -- who knows? Certainly not the state."