Nursing homes have become ground zero in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, with outbreaks causing high rates of illness and death among vulnerable residents living together in close quarters.
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the chasms, the fissures, the cracks in many American institutions. Nowhere, though, are they more apparent than in the nation’s arrangements for long-term care — specifically, in its nursing homes, where some 1.4 million people, mostly women, live out the rest of their days.