Administrators: Patients with ESKD, care givers should be priority for COVID-19 vaccine
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The National Renal Administrators Association sent letters to CMS and the CDC urging the agencies to prioritize issuance of the COVID-19 vaccine to patients with end-stage renal disease and the dialysis clinic staff who provide their care.
“The high risk of virus exposure for ESRD patients and their caregivers at dialysis clinics combined with the underlying prevalence of multiple comorbidities and overall suppressed immunity have resulted in substantially higher rates of hospitalization and likely mortality from COVID-19 in the ESRD patient population compared to non-ESRD patients,” the National Renal Administrators Association (NRAA) wrote in letters to the two agencies. “It is therefore imperative that ESRD patients and the dialysis clinic staff who care for them have priority status in COVID-19 vaccine distribution.”
The association wrote in the letters that the heightened risk of COVID-19 exposure that patients with ESRD face “has led to Medicare beneficiaries with ESRD having a more than four times greater likelihood of contracting the virus than aged and disabled beneficiaries. ESRD beneficiaries who have contracted COVID-19 have had a hospitalization rate more than seven times higher (2,194 per 100,000 beneficiaries) than that of either aged (320 per 100,000) or disabled (268 per 100,000) beneficiaries.”
It remains unclear how many patients with ESRD receiving care in the United States have contracted COVID-19; last month, the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology sent a letter to CMS asking for access to national data on this.
“Comprehensively understanding the spread of COVID-19 among symptomatic, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic dialysis patients has been challenging because CMS has not thus far made data on COVID-19 infection rates among in-center and home dialysis patients available to researchers, patients or practitioners,” the organization leaders wrote.
The NRAA wrote in the letters that the disproportionately high rates of hospitalization for Medicare beneficiaries with ESRD and COVID-19 follow data reported by the U.S. Renal Data System, “which strongly suggest a discernible and marked increase in mortality in the ESRD patient population from COVID-19.”
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