The devastating toll coronavirus has taken on Louisiana nursing home residents crystallized Monday when state public health officials, for the first time since the pandemic's earliest days, released data about how many deaths and infections had occurred within each of the 279 licensed nursing homes across the state.
Monday marked the first time in more than six weeks that the state publicly released such information. It came after weeks of public records requests from The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, which have repeatedly pressed state officials to provide specific details about the virus's impact.
The data shows outbreaks in some nursing homes have been jaw-dropping in scale — with dozens of deaths and scores of infections — while others have apparently yet to be touched by the virus. It includes information never released before, including numbers of cases among both residents and staff at individual homes, as well as the numbers of resident deaths.
The data is still limited, however. For now, Louisiana health officials are only reporting these details for the 279 licensed nursing homes in the state. Hundreds of other facilities, including assisted living homes, behavioral and mental health centers and other places where potentially vulnerable adults live in communal settings, are not included in Monday's release.
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This means that some homes, such as Lambeth House or Vista Shores Assisted Living, both in New Orleans, which the state identified as early clusters of infections, were not included in Monday's list. However, St. Anna's, a nursing home within Lambeth House, was included.
The release reveals the horrific toll the virus has taken at some well-known hotspots, and brings new ones to light. J. Michael Morrow Memorial Nursing Home in Arnaudville, near Lafayette, has had the deadliest outbreak, the data show, with 34 of its residents having died. Forest Manor, in Covington, has lost 33 residents.
Other homes have also lost dozens of residents. Twenty-eight passed away at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Home in Reserve, 26 at Metairie Healthcare and 23 at both Greenbriar Community Care Center in Slidell and Garden Park Nursing and Rehab Center in Shreveport.
In Baton Rouge, the worst outbreak has been at Old Jefferson Community Care Center, where 21 have died.
The home with the highest number of known infections is Highland Place Rehab and Nursing Center in Shreveport. The home has reported 124 cases and 17 deaths.
Overall, the new data show, 987 nursing home residents have passed away from the disease across Louisiana. Those deaths account for more than 40% of the state's death toll. Overall, deaths among people aged 60 or more account for about 85% of the state's total deaths from coronavirus.
In some small Louisiana parishes, all or nearly all of the coronavirus deaths have been in nursing homes. For instance, all 10 of the COVID-19 deaths in Franklin Parish took place at two nursing homes there, and 28 of the 33 deaths in Iberia Parish were in nursing homes.
But in the state's coronavirus epicenters, nursing homes did not play as outsized a role. Only 20% of the deaths in Orleans Parish and 31% of the deaths in Jefferson Parish have been in nursing homes, the data show. Those two parishes have seen by far the most deaths from COVID-19 in the state.
While Monday's release is useful and will be cheered by many families and activists, it may not tell the full story, said Susan Hassig an epidemiologist with the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
Hassig noted the data can lack nuance; for instance, some nursing homes, such as the veterans' home in Reserve, have hospice units, and you’d expect those facilities to have higher fatality rates, because these people were already very near to death. Likewise, ease of access to hospitals could affect the numbers.
She said some deaths that were actually caused by COVID-19 may not have been counted in the release because the person wasn't tested before they passed or because they died outside of the nursing home, perhaps at a hospital.
Until late March, state officials were publicly reporting the names of homes where there were clusters of two or more cases, but they stopped at that point, saying the volume of cases made it difficult to continue to report clusters. They also declined to provide it in response to public records requests from the newspaper. But on Monday afternoon, after the state released the new data, an attorney for the Louisiana Department of Health said the new weekly reports would satisfy several of the paper's requests.
On Monday, Gov. John Bel Edwards said the state's move from a "mitigation" phase of fighting the virus to a "suppression" phase enabled the new reporting. It also closely tracks similar reporting that is planned by the federal government, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those agencies will report that information publicly perhaps by the end of the month, officials said.
A key element of the state's suppression strategy is a ramping-up of testing of residents and staff in nursing homes, which have already been under strict lockdown for more than two months, with many residents confined to their rooms, prohibited from having visitors and unable to partake in communal dining and other activities. State officials have have issued guidance that urges the homes to regularly test all residents and staff at nursing homes, and medical directors in the state's nine Department of Health regions are forming "strike teams" that can go in and help nursing homes obtain and administer tests.
Some homes have already begun doing this, Edwards said Monday.
Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates most nursing homes, said Monday that baseline testing of residents and staff must happen before nursing homes can begin to loosen restrictions on nursing home residents and visitors.
Such testing, though desirable, would have been impossible in the early days of the pandemic, Tulane's Hassig said.
"It was hard to get a test anywhere. Part of the challenge now is to remember how our testing capacity has dramatically changed," Hassig said.
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Info on all 279 Louisiana nursing homes with coronavirus cases released for 1st time; search list here - NOLA.com
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