Covid Forces Families to Rethink Nursing Home Care

Even with vaccines, many older people and their relatives are weighing how to manage at-home care for those who can no longer live independently.

At 86, Diane Nixon, living in an apartment at the back of a daughter’s house, no longer drives and has trouble getting around. When her health worsened last year before the coronavirus pandemic, she and all four of her daughters talked about whether a nursing home would be the next step. She worried that she had become a burden to her children. “She was very adamant about not wanting her daughters to be caregivers,” said Jill Cooper, one of her daughters, who lives nearby in the Pittsburgh area.