The overall economic, social and personal toll from the COVID-19 pandemic will take years to assess, but today, no one group has suffered more than nursing homes.

Older adults often have chronic illness, making the frail residents the most vulnerable people in our health care system.

Coronavirus has caused much trauma in this sector of the population.

A recent study showed 57 percent of the deaths in Canada and approximately half of all deaths in Europe were related to nursing home patients, including 64 percent in Norway, 49 percent in Belgium, and an estimated 53 percent of the total deaths in Spain.

In the U.S., 73 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in Minnesota are related to nursing homes.

In communities such as Kirkland, Washington, home of one of the country’s first virus outbreaks, nearly all of their deaths have been related to nursing homes.

Over half of state death tolls have also been recorded in Massachusetts, Colorado, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Given these high numbers, President Donald Trump made the safety of our senior citizens a priority last week by forming an independent commission to look at how nursing homes have responded to the pandemic.

The Coronavirus Commission for Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes will include leading industry experts, doctors and scientists, resident and patient advocates, family members, infection and prevention control specialists, and state and local authorities.

Trump has already authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send two shipments of personal protective gear to every nursing home by July 4.

Nursing homes certainly warrant priority status.

A 2014 report from the Center for Retirement Research states that 44 percent of men and 58 percent of women 65 years and older will use nursing home care at some point in their lives.

Since nursing home residents live in close quarters, it’s a challenge to move or quarantine them once they are sick. Caregivers who move from room to room assisting residents are also susceptible to the virus and need to have their voices heard and their concerns addressed.

The decision to restrict nearly all visitors to facilities also takes a social and emotional toll on the residents. Many are not tuned to modern social media technologies such as video chats.

Some remarkable survival stories have emerged from the pandemic. On March 5, William “Bill” Lapschies was isolated in his room at a veterans home in Lebanon, Oregon, after testing positive for the virus. Thankfully the case was mild without severe respiratory issues.

Believed to be the nation’s oldest survivor of the pandemic, Lapschies recovered in time for his 104th birthday last week.

In the United Kingdom, Hilda Churchill, a 108-year-old woman who survived World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu, is thought to have become the oldest victim of coronavirus. She died in a care home in Manchester, hours after testing positive and just eight days before her 109th birthday.

Jewell Hutson, a North Texas woman, was 7 years old when the 1918 flu pandemic broke out. Her family survived that outbreak, in large part because they stayed home.

Hutson says the current pandemic gives us a chance to remember our history, learn from our mistakes and not repeat them.

When history looks back on this societywide shutdown, it will show economic devastation - the staggering job losses, small businesses that have been forced to close, the trillions of dollars in lost savings and an exploding federal debt.

We pray that the mistakes Jewell warned us about repeating will not include a failure to protect the most vulnerable among us.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com