I don't think nursing homes are as terrible as they're made out to be, at least not as a general concept. The issue, in my view, is much like the issue with private prisons - you have a highly vulnerable population with little recourse against the people in charge, because those people have so much control over residents' lives.

There should be much greater regulation along with frequent inspections and a mandate that residents have information in their rooms about how to report issues directly to the government.

Those things obviously wouldn't help with the coronavirus issues at present, but having that type of government infrastructure involved with nursing homes would have put a lot of pieces in place to allow for a more consistent and coherent response when we started seeing Covid cases.

Of course we also needed PPE and testing en masse at nursing homes early on, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway.