A nursing home in northern Illinois has become one of the latest US care facilities to report a deadly outbreak of COVID-19.
Twenty-two residents and one staff member at the Symphony of Joliet have died after testing positive for coronavirus, a spokeswoman for the facility announced Wednesday.
More than 4,810 deaths have been linked to coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term facilities across the country, according to the Associated Press, which has been keeping its own count as the federal government has not released an official tally.
But the true toll among the one million mostly frail and elderly people who live in such facilities is likely much higher, experts say, because most state counts don’t include those who died without ever being tested for COVID-19.
Outbreaks in just the past few weeks have been reported across a number of states, including Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington state and now Illinois.
Twenty-two residents and one staff member at the Symphony of Joliet nursing home in northern Illinois have died after testing positive for coronavirus
Diane Brooks (left) died aged 65 from coronavirus earlier this month while living at Symphony of Joliet. Fellow resident Gerald Frances (right), an 84-year-old Army vet, died on Tuesday after he also tested positive for COVID-19
The death toll at Symphony of Joliet spiked dramatically this week after just three fatalities were reported at the facility last week.
Symphony spokeswoman Lauryn Allison insisted that staffing has been adequate and the employees have been following government guidelines for minimizing the spread of the virus.
She said they began moving healthy residents from the facility to other locations in its network earlier this month.
‘It’s a global pandemic, there’s nothing they could have done to prevent it,’ she said.
But a brother and sister of a 65-year-old woman who was one of the 23 to die said the care at the facility was inadequate.
‘She was complaining that she was in constant pain,’ Michael Brooks told the Chicago Tribune after his sister, Diane Brooks, died.
‘Sometimes she would defecate herself without them changing her. We’d come visit her, and who knows how long she was like that.’
Brooks and his other sister, Dorisell, said they also saw that Diane Brooks, who needed around-the-clock care after suffering an aneurysm and stroke, also had bed sores.
They said that they were never told by anyone at Symphony that their sister had contracted the virus.
The family of fellow victim Gerald Francis, an 84-year-old Army veteran, said that the care home never told them about his COVID-19 diagnosis.
They learned he had contracted the virus after Francis died on Tuesday, the family said.
Brooks’ loved ones said they were not informed that she had COVID-19 until after she was rushed to the hospital. The family released the photo above to local TV station WLS
Francis’ family said that they were not informed of his COVID-19 diagnosis until after he died. He is pictured with his now-widow, Mary Ann Francis
More than 8,200 coronavirus cases and at least 720 deaths reported across 379 long-term care facilities in New Jersey
Data released on Thursday revealed that New Jersey’s nursing homes are being hit especially hard by the coronavirus crisis, with more than 8,200 cases reported in outbreaks at 379 long-term care facilities.
There have been at least 720 coronavirus-related deaths reported from 375 nursing homes and 200 assisted living facilities statewide.
The new figures came days after New Jersey police discovered 18 bodies piled in the tiny morgue at Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center on Monday night after an anonymous tipster claimed that a body was being stored outside a shed at the facility.
By the time police arrived at the nursing home, the body had been removed from the shed.
But a search around the facility – which is one of the state’s largest residential care homes – revealed 18 corpses had been stacked in a small morgue designed to hold no more than four.
The home, which has room for 700 beds, has suffered 68 deaths in recent weeks, including two nurses.
Of those who died, 26 have tested positive for the coronavirus. The cause of dearth of the others is not known, and it is possible more may also have been killed by the disease.
‘They were just overwhelmed by the amount of people who were expiring,’ Andover police chief Eric C Danielson told the New York Times.
Police were called to the largest nursing home in New Jersey after reports of a body being left outside in a shed. In the end 18 bodies were found and moved to this refrigerated truck
Thirteen of the discovered bodies were moved to a refrigerated truck outside a hospital in the nearby town of Newton. A funeral home picked up the other four.
Seventy-six patients who are still housed at the facility have tested positive for coronavirus, and 41 members of staff are out sick with it.
The extent of the outbreak at Andover has outraged family members, who have demanded answers from Congress.
‘The challenge we’re having with all of these nursing homes, is once it spreads, it’s like a wildfire,’ said Representative Josh Gottheimer. ‘It’s very hard to stop it.’
Like many nursing homes across the country there has been a lack of testing for coronavirus and PPE for staff at the Andover Subacute home to wear
Forty-five residents die at Virginia nursing home after testing positive for COVID-19
The Canterbury Rehabilitation Healthcare Center near Richmond has reported at least 45 deaths in what’s become one of the worst coronavirus clusters in the country.
Since the outbreak began, more than 100 elderly residents and 35 staff members have tested positive for COVID-19 at the facility, which is home to 163 residents.
‘It’s been tough,’ medical director Dr James Wright told Reuters earlier this week.
‘We were surprised by how quickly this went through.’
More than 100 elderly residents and 35 staff members have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Canterbury Rehabilitation Healthcare Center in Henrico County
Wright told media at a recent news conference: ‘It’s a battle that at times we feel like we’re losing. It’s a battle that we have to fight every day and night, seven days a week.’
He said the virus has exacerbated an existing staffing shortage, with some staffers refusing to come to work for fear of getting ill.
‘We did the best we could,’ he said.
The situation was made even worse by a severe shortage of personal protective equipment such as medical masks and gowns, Wright said.
‘We were prepared as we could be,’ he said, ‘What this virus tends to do is find a susceptible population and spread rapidly without being detected.’
Of the 97 known coronavirus outbreaks in Virginia, 53 are in long-term care facilities such as Canterbury, state health officials said during a press briefing Monday with Gov Ralph Northam.
Family members had to visit relatives through a window at the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Richmond, Virginia
Nevada nursing home where coronavirus outbreak has infected at least 36 people and killed two tells staff to reuse surgical masks
The Lakeside Health and Wellness assisted living center in Reno sent a letter to its nursing staff on March 26 instructing them to store their masks overnight in a paper bag and then re-wear them inside out on the second day.
‘When returning the next day that you are scheduled, you will use the same mask as the prior shift, by turning it inside out and wearing it through your shift,’ the letter obtained by the Reno Gazette Journal said.
‘That mask will then be discarded at the end of your 2-days.’
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines state that the outside surface of a surgical mask should be considered contaminated and that health care workers are not to come into contact with it.
The facility asked its employees to sign and date the letter so as to indicate that they would adhere to the mask guideline.
One nursing assistant who spoke to the Gazette said she couldn’t believe it when she saw the letter.
‘That doesn’t make sense to me,’ she said.
‘You’re putting the exposed side back on your face. Of course I didn’t turn it inside out.
‘That’s just common sense.’
DailyMail.com has reached out to the nursing home for comment.
State health officials are investigating the nursing home as well as at least 19 other assisted living facilities after suspected coronavirus outbreaks affected residents and staff there.
The Lakeside Health and Wellness assisted living center sent a letter to its nursing staff on March 26 instructing them to store their masks overnight in a paper bag and then re-wear them inside out on the second day
States face mounting pressure to publicly track COVID-19 cases at nursing homes
It’s possible many more outbreaks are occurring at care homes that have not reached the media, as most states provide only total numbers of deaths across all facilities.
Experts say care home deaths may keep climbing because of chronic staffing shortages that have been made worse by the coronavirus crisis, a shortage of protective supplies and a continued lack of available testing.
And the deaths have skyrocketed despite steps taken by the federal government in mid-March to bar visitors, cease all group activities, and require that every worker be screened for fever or respiratory symptoms at every shift.
But an AP report earlier this month found that infections were continuing to find their way into nursing homes because such screenings didn’t catch people who were infected but asymptomatic.
Critics say the lack of tracking and transparency has been a major blind spot, and that publicizing outbreaks as they happen could not only alert nearby communities and anguished relatives but also help officials see where to focus testing and other safety measures.
‘This is basic public health – you track this, you study it, and you learn from it,’ said David Grabowski, who specializes in health care policy at Harvard Medical School.
He said it’s difficult to have confidence in officials’ ability to contain the virus if they aren’t tracking where it has struck and why.
Such an action by the agencies that oversee the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes is seen as long overdue, coming more than a month after a nursing home in Washington state became the first COVID-19 hot spot in the US with an outbreak that ultimately killed 43 people and a near-daily drumbeat of new cases that in some cases has forced entire homes to be evacuated.
‘We recognize there should be more reporting,’ said Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, during a call with reporters on Wednesday.
Verma said her agency is working with the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention to increase reporting on outbreaks.
But she did not provide details on how that would work or what information would be made public, other than to say her agency was considering requiring homes to disclose information to residents and their family members.
Medics transport a patient from an ambulance into Life Care Center of Kirkland, the long-term care facility linked to confirmed coronavirus cases in Washington state
Many individual states have added to the lack of transparency by releasing only totals of infections and deaths and not details about specific outbreaks.
Foremost among them is the nation’s leader, New York, which accounts for more than 2,477 nursing home deaths – about 20 percent of the state’s entire death total – but has so far refused to detail specific outbreaks, citing privacy concerns.
New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said this week that even releasing total numbers by nursing homes could violate the privacy of individuals, which is protected under federal health privacy law.
‘The issue is here as I’ve mentioned previously, this is their home. The nursing homes are their home,’ he said.
Nevada, on the other hand, unveiled an online tool this week that allows people to track cases in specific nursing homes and other assisted living facilities.
‘It’s just scandalous not to tell the public which facilities have the virus,’ said Charlene Harrington, a professor emerita at the University of California San Francisco and former state health official.
‘Even some staff members don’t know. They’re hiding it because it’s bad for business and it’s just horrible.’
Mark Parkinson, the head of the American Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, said a national reporting system for homes could at least help prioritize the potential hot spots most in need of testing and personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns.
That lack of PPE and mandatory testing for residents and staff are among the gaps experts say have allowed deaths to continue mounting at nursing homes.
Chris Laxton, executive director of the The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, said a national database would help to create a picture ‘of how completely dire the situation is in nursing homes. Not only is it underreported, but we’re nowhere near the peak and it’s continuing to surge’.
