When Covid-19 came the following winter, elderly and disabled veterans were among the hardest hit. Soldiers who’d survived battles couldn’t survive the pandemic, as viruses spread through many VA homes that lacked proper controls.

More than 1,400 people — at least 1,394 residents and 40 staff — died of coronavirus in 110 state veterans homes, according to a POLITICO analysis. The death toll is almost certainly even higher; data from another four dozen homes, mostly in the South, hasn’t been publicly reported. Many of those states are now contending with the worst of the Delta variant. Even without the statistics from those homes, the death rate in state-run facilities was more than twice that of homes run directly by the VA itself.

Residents in state VA homes often died in large clusters: 110 at a 126-bed home in western New York, 62 (plus two staff) in one at the southern tip of Maryland, 47 at a complex in rural Wisconsin, 44 near the shore of Lake Erie in Sandusky, Ohio. More than half the deaths occurred well into the pandemic, after testing, protective gear and other resources became more available, and after much had been learned about how to contain the virus and prevent its devastating spread, including by asymptomatic staff.

It was tragic. But not inevitable.