Older adults in nursing homes who survived a COVID-19 infection during the first wave of the pandemic didn’t have a high death rate in the two years that followed, a new study shows.
The study was published in BMC Geriatrics on Thursday. It covered residents of three nursing homes in France from March through May of 2020. The residents’ average age was 88, and 48% had severe disability.
Among the 403 residents who lived in the nursing homes during the first wave, 15% of them died. Of the 315 people who survived the first wave, 35% contracted COVID-19 and 9% were hospitalized for it.
Having a history of COVID-19 was not associated with 2-year mortality. Instead, factors like older age, more severe disability and malnutrition were more closely linked with two-year mortality. Vaccination against COVID-19 also was associated with better survival, the data showed.
The authors noted that they predicted nursing home residents who survived COVID-19 would have higher two-year mortality rates compared with those who didn’t get the virus, based on previous research that showed survivors lost more body weight, and had worsening frailty and functional status. The team knew disability and malnutrition are risk factors for increased mortality, so they were surprised to find that survivors in the study didn’t have higher mortality. The team called their findings “intriguing.”
“We assume that by including only the survivors of the [first COVID-19 pandemic wave] … we selected residents with less severe forms of COVID-19 infection,” the authors wrote.
“Surviving COVID-19 infection in the [first COVID-19 pandemic wave] may have conferred some COVID-19 immunity during the second pandemic wave, even if immunity has been shown to be altered in [nursing home] residents,” the authors added.
