People died in nursing homes because governors forced the homes to accept active Covid cases and then when the residents became ill, they were told to do nothing, not treated, until they needed hospitalization. Any treatment given likely Midazolam and or Remdesivir - both are disastrous and resulted in needless death.
If they had treated Covid like any other illness and allowed physicians to treat patients as they normally do, based on patient medical history, and not required nursing homes to accept actively ill people, and not killed patients with Midazolam and Remdesivir, none of this would look any different from any other year.
No, that's not what happened in my town. A contract physical therapist who worked in all three nursing homes, and who was covid positive, brought it into the nursing homes. There was no known treatment or vaccine at the time. My daughter - a nurse - ran the covid unit in one of the homes. The local doctors finally came up with some treatment protocols that had some positive effect, but over the course of that first year, she still lost 19 residents to covid. When the vaccines became available, she stopped losing patients to covid.