| After an investment firm bought St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged, in Richmond, Virginia, the company reduced staff, removed amenities, and set the stage for a deadly outbreak of COVID-19.  Illustration by Jo Zixuan St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged was once a beloved nursing home with a family-oriented ambiance, where nuns lived with residents and the waiting list for a room was three years long. There were manicured gardens, a lively aviary and an aquarium, and warm common areas with “a china cabinet here, an upright piano there,” as Yasmin Rafiei writes. “Take a deep breath,” a resident told Rafiei, during a visit in May, 2021. “What don’t you smell? A nursing home.” Then, in June last year, the home was sold to a private-equity firm called the Portopiccolo Group. The situation is not uncommon: since the turn of the millennium, there’s been a trend toward private-equity investment in nursing homes. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that, “when private-equity firms acquired nursing homes, deaths among residents increased by an average of ten per cent,” as Rafiei writes. At St. Joseph’s, which was renamed Karolwood Gardens, residents began eating meals alone in their rooms, nursing staff plummeted, and the home experienced a string of COVID-19 infections and deaths. Rafiei delves into the question of why deaths skyrocket in private-equity-owned homes, and tells a deeply reported story of St. Joseph’s devastating transformation. —Jessie Li, newsletter editor Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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