  We explore the effect of nursing home status on healthcare outcomes such as
hospitalisation, mortality and in-hospital mortality during the COVID-19
pandemic. Some claim that in specific Autonomous Communities (geopolitical
divisions) in Spain, elderly people in nursing homes had restrictions on access
to hospitals and treatments, which raised a public outcry about the fairness of
such measures. In this work, the case of the Basque Country is studied under a
rigorous statistical approach and a physician's perspective. As
fairness/unfairness is hard to model mathematically and has strong real-world
implications, this work concentrates on the following simplification:
establishing if the nursing home status had a direct effect on healthcare
outcomes once accounted for other meaningful patients' information such as age,
health status and period of the pandemic, among others. The methods followed
here are a combination of established techniques as well as new proposals from
the fields of causality and fair learning. The current analysis suggests that
as a group, people in nursing homes were significantly less likely to be
hospitalised, and considerably more likely to die, even in hospitals, compared
to their non-residents counterparts during most of the pandemic. Further data
collection and analysis are needed to guarantee that this is solely/mainly due
to nursing home status.
