IRPP STUDY - Life and Death in Long- Term Care: Are We Learning

Instead of using the most common metric for measuring the performance of LTC insti- tutions — the percentage of long-term care deaths relative to total deaths — the report measures the change in differential mortality between a nonpandemic year, 2018, and the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. [...] 9 Life and Death in Long-Term Care: Are We Learning the Wrong Lessons from COVID-19? the expected number of deaths, we applied age-specific mortality rates2 of the gen- eral population (for all causes of death in 2018 and COVID-19 deaths in 2020) to the age distribution of residents of long-term care institutions in 2018-19 (see Appen- dix A for details of the methodology). [...] Once we have the numbers for these five- year age bands, we simply add them to get the numbers for the 10-year age bands of the mortality risk: for example, having estimated the numbers of LTC residents in the age bands [70-74] and [75-79], we get the number of LTC residents in the age band [70-79]. [...] We need to use our distribution (proportions of the population of residents in each age band) and apply it to some measure of the total num- ber of residents in LTC homes in Canada to get the age distribution of residents in Canada (the numbers to which we apply the age-specific mortality risks for COVID-19 and for all causes). [...] 29 Life and Death in Long-Term Care: Are We Learning the Wrong Lessons from COVID-19? Proportion of COVID-19 related deaths in institutions: This is the ratio of the number of deaths due to COVID-19 that took place in institutions to the total number of deaths due to the virus in the province (deaths that took place in the community plus deaths that took place in institutions).