Nearly 16,000 Covid-19 nursing home deaths in the US were unreported during the early months of the pandemic, a report led by Harvard researcher Karen Shen has revealed. The report, published in the JAMA Network Open, found the missing numbers take up 14 percent of all nursing home deaths in 2020, reports Xinhua news agency.

Researchers also estimated that 68,000 additional coronavirus cases – representing nearly 12% of last year’s total nursing home cases – were omitted before a federal reporting requirement took effect in late May 2020.

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Researchers compared federal counts with the numbers captured by 20 states that separately tracked nursing home outbreaks and deaths. Four in 10 deaths went unreported prior to the requirement, the review determined.

By studying data across 20 states, the report found that 44 percent of all Covid-19 cases and 40 percent of deaths in nursing homes counted by states health departments were unaccounted for in the federal data.

“This may demonstrate a widespread inability of nursing homes to reliably collect data early in the pandemic or that pressures to report fewer cases and deaths were common to all facilities,” the researchers wrote.

The academics said they were driven to ensure the pandemic’s full toll is not forgotten. Applying their findings to the entire nation, they pegged the true impact on nursing homes at 592,629 cases and 118,335 deaths by the end of 2020.

“We would just lose a sense of those people’s lives in the history books,” said lead author Karen Shen, who recently completed her graduate work at Harvard University. “That just didn’t feel right to us.”

The US is witnessing a Covid-19 resurgence fuelled by the highly transmissible Delta variant. As of Sunday morning, the total number of confirmed cases in the country increased to 40,920,922, while the death toll stood at 659,691, according to Johns Hopkins University’s latest data. The two tallies are the highest in the world, making the US the worst-hit country.