A team of researchers from UCLA and Yale University decided to examine the people who continued to enter nursing homes during the beginning of the coronavirus in March 2020, the employees! Keith Chen, a behavioral economist and UCLA professor said the key question is this: “The people who, we can infer, work in this nursing home, what other nursing homes do they work at?”

Using location data from 30 million smartphones when the visitor ban was in place helped the scientists “see” the movements of people going into and out of nursing homes. The data showed a lot of nursing home workers are working at more than one facility. Chen said the findings suggest that staffers who work in multiple nursing homes are one source of the spread of infections.

The UCLA team created maps of movement and found that on average each nursing home is connected to seven others through staff movement. Limiting nursing home employees to one facility could mean fewer COVID-19 infection, but that would hurt the workforce of people who say they work multiple jobs because of low wages. They identified that the more shared workers a nursing home has, the more COVID-19 infections among the residents.

The reason this is important is that many of YOUR staff are working in more than one nursing home in order to make a living. It might be time to determine what wages look like in your area and if you are compensating enough to allow staff to maintain one full-time job versus multiple jobs to support their families. Read the article published in the UCLA Anderson Review on August 3, 2020. Stay the course, stay strong, stay well, stay safe, mask up, and stay tuned!