Staff Working in Multiple Nursing Homes Contributed to Pandemic Spread

Some nursing home staff members are employed at multiple facilities, and their movements between locations could contribute to the spread of COVID-19. Research Associate Judy Chevalier of Yale University and her collaborators, studying geolocation data from cellphones, estimate that in the six weeks following the nationwide ban on visitors to nursing homes, seven percent of those who spent time on the premises of one facility also spent time at another one. They find that fatalities from COVID-19 were substantially higher in facilities that were more connected to others through overlapping staff. The results are presented in a working paper (27608) and summarized in a short video below.

Eleven NBER working papers distributed this week examine the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the actual or potential consequences of various policy responses to it. The studies analyze the impact of the pandemic on consumer spending (27617), the effect of the Paycheck Protection Program on firms and their workers (27623, 27624, 27629), how the pandemic is changing workplace collaboration (27612), the labor market impact of pandemic-related declines in product demand (27613), and the role of workers employed at multiple nursing homes in spreading the virus (27608). Other research explores the sharp rise in corporations’ demand for cash early in the pandemic (27601), how COVID-19 and associated policy actions have affected air pollution in Taiwan (27604), the impact of the pandemic on the use of health care for non-COVID-19 conditions (27621), and the role of changing household behavior in modeling pandemic spread (27632).

More than 200 NBER working papers have presented pandemic-related research.  These papers are open access and have been collected for easy reference. Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed. View them in reverse chronological order or by topic area.