Residents of long-term care communities in the South and Southeast are less likely to be up to date on COVID-19 vaccines, according to a report released Friday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, older adults accounted for 87.9% deaths from COVID-19 earlier this year, and they made up nearly 63% of COVID-19 cases, according to a report released the same day in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Researchers gathered data from 1,797 long-term care communities to look at COVID-19 vaccination status at the facilities; 99% of the communities were nursing homes. The data was collected from October 2022 to May 2023.
The team considered up-to-date vaccine status as anyone who got a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine dose or completed their primary vaccine series less than two months earlier.
The percentage of people with up-to-date COVID-19 shots in the South was 37.7%; in the Southeast it was 36.5%. That’s lower than in other regions, the CDC reported.
More people over the age of 75 — many of them nursing home residents — were up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines compared to those between the ages of 30 and 39. American Indian, Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander residents were the most up to date with COVID-19 vaccines, while current vaccination was lowest among Black and multiracial people.
The second report — on hospitalization rates of older adults with COVID-19 — found that hospitalization rates among people 65 and older increased from 6.8 per 100,000 people during the week ending July 15 to 16.4 per 100,000 during the week ending Aug. 26. About 1 in 6 older adults hospitalized for COVID-19 were nursing home residents. The report drew from data on people over the age of 65 from 98 counties in 13 states.
People over 65 made up 62.9% of all COVID-19 hospitalizations, 61.3% of all intensive care unit admissions and 87.9% of deaths in hospitals. Of the people at hospitals, 23.5% had the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine at the time; 16% had never had a COVID-19 vaccine.
These findings suggest that COVID-19–associated hospitalizations continue to predominantly affect adults aged 65 years and up, and represent a continued public health threat, the CDC stated in the report.
