COVID-19 and long-term care facilities: Does ownership matter?

McGregor and Harrington explore if ownership matters in COVID-19 and long-term care (LTC) facilities. They reflect on a research by Stall and colleagues that examine the relation between ownership of LTC facility and the occurrence, extent and mortality associated with outbreaks of COVID-19 in Ontario's 623 LTC facilities. In their analysis, adjusted at the facility level, the authors found no association between ownership and the odds of an outbreak occurrence. They did find, however, that facilities run on a for-profit basis had more extensive outbreaks and more deaths than facilities run on a nonprofit basis, with an even more marked effect when for-profit facilities were compared with facilities that were entirely municipally run. However, when multi-bed room design was added to the model, for-profit ownership status lost its significance for these outcomes, leading the authors to conclude that building upgrades should be an important part of addressing the problems in the LTC sector in Ontario.