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.