Nursing home networks and Covid-19

We construct network measures of nursing home connectedness and estimate that nursing homes have, on average, connections with 15 other facilities. Controlling for demographic and other factors, a home’s staff-network connections and its centrality within the greater network strongly predict COVID-19 cases. Traditional federal regulatory metrics of nursing home quality are unimportant in predicting outbreaks, consistent with recent research. Results suggest that eliminating staff linkages between nursing homes could reduce COVID-19 infections in nursing homes by 44 percent.

That is from a new NBER working paper by M. Keith Chen, Judith A. Chevalier, and Elisa F. Long, and I am going to nominate this as one of the very best and most important papers of the year.