Families deserve straight talk about nursing home safety

The headlines have been grim. Seventeen bodies piled up in the morgue at a New Jersey nursing home. Fifty-five residents dead in Brooklyn, N.Y. In one week, 104 residents dead in a facility in western Pennsylvania and 102 dead at a home in San Antonio. In Detroit 26 percent of nursing home residents and staff test positive for the coronavirus.

Residents in nursing homes had been at risk long before I began reporting on them in the 1990s, and care facilities have continued to be the subject of press inquiry all across the country. Staffing shortages, poor care, and downright abuse had been...