The NIA’s Long-Term Care COVID Tracker pause, and the importance of reliable data

Abby Hughes - August 12, 2022.

Since the very first days of the pandemic, the National Institute
on Ageing based out of Toronto Metropolitan University has been
crunching the COVID numbers in long term care homes.

In fact, throughout the pandemic they were the only organization to
keep comprehensive data on cases, deaths and outbreaks in every
province in the country.

But on July 28, the NIA announced they would be shutting down their
Long-Term Care COVID-19 Tracker Project. The two year endeavour
came to a halt, not because the thinktank no longer feels the need
to track covid numbers, but because provinces and territories
across the nation are no longer providing them with the numbers
once used to compile their totals.

Dr. Samir Sinha is the director of geriatrics at Sinai Health, and
the Director of Health Policy Research for the NIA. Today, I’ll
talk with him about how the tracker totals were compiled, who used
those figures, and the impact comprehensive data can have.