Place of death before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Place of death before and during the COVID-19 pandemic
JAMA Network, by Ben Teasdale, MPhil; Aditya Narayan, BS; Stephanie Harman, MD; Kevin A. Schulman, MD; 1/8/24
As recently as 2015, dying at home became more common than dying in a hospital. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted these trends, as the acute clinical course of severe infection shifted deaths back inside hospitals. Beyond the direct consequence of pandemic-related mortality, indirect associations of factors, such as workforce and resource limitations, disrupted the provision of end-of-life care more broadly, even for patients who were not directly infected with COVID-19. Three years after the start of the pandemic, we investigate the national and ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and place of death among individuals in the US.