Nursing Home Aides Aren’t Taking Sick Leave After Exposure To COVID-19 – Why?
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated America’s nursing homes, but the reasons aren’t as simple as people might think.
To understand how nursing homes became the source of over one-third of U.S. COVID-19 deaths, you have to look beyond just the vulnerability of the residents and examine how nursing homes pay and manage their employees.
The average nursing aide earns just $14.25 an hour, less than $30,000 a year. Many are women who work at multiple nursing homes to make ends meet. Partly as a result of that, the typical nursing home has staff connections to 15 other facilities – each an opportunity for the coronavirus to spread. That risk is magnified by a reluctance among many nursing aides to take sick days when they are ill, even though federal law currently requires employers to provid...