Giving Compass' Take:

• Despite Canada's overall successful response to the pandemic, nursing homes, and long-term care facilities are still linked to 81 percent of the country's COVID-19-related deaths. 

• Canadian public health experts advocate that Canada look to other countries' strategies to stop outbreaks in nursing homes, which include increasing testing capacity and protective gear for workers in homes.  How can donors help expand and implement these strategies to cultivate an adequate response? 

• Read more on why improved infection control in nursing homes is necessary. 

Canada’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has generally been viewed as a success, with experts pointing to its political leadership and universal health care system as factors.

But there has been one glaring failure in Canada’s fight against the pandemic: its inability to protect the health of its senior citizens in nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

The situation for these seniors is so dire that the police — and even the military — have been called in to investigate why so many are dying.

In Quebec, some residents have been left for days in soiled diapers, going hungry and thirsty, and 31 residents were found dead at one home in less than a month, leading to accusations of gross negligence. In Ontario, the military found shocking conditions in five homes: cockroaches and rotten food, blatant disregard for infection control measures, and treatment of residents that was deemed “borderline abusive, if not abusive.”

A whopping 81 percent of the country’s coronavirus deaths are linked to nursing homes and long-term care facilities. That means roughly 7,050 out of 8,700 deaths to date have been among residents and workers in these facilities.

n terms of raw numbers, that may not seem like very much. (For comparison, more than 40,000 US coronavirus deaths have been linked to nursing homes.) And, to be clear, Canada is hardly alone in watching tragedy unfold in these facilities. The US and Europe have seen startling numbers of fatalities among nursing home staffers and residents.

But 81 percent is a staggering statistic, especially for Canada, a country that prides itself on its progressive health policies. And it’s higher than the rate in any other country for which we have good data. In European countries, roughly 50 percent of coronavirus deaths are linked to these facilities. In the US, it’s 40 percent.

Read the full article about Canada's nursing homes by Sigal Samuel at Vox.