The number of cases of COVID-19 at a Greenwood nursing home has grown fivefold in less than 10 days.
Crystal Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center has 20 cases of the respiratory disease that is especially dangerous for the elderly and those with other health problems, a company spokesman acknowledged Wednesday.
It is, however, “a manageable situation for which effective preventative and recovery efforts are in place,” Joe Gimenez, who represents Crystal Rehab’s parent company, Nexion Health, said in an email.
He did not provide further details.
On April 13, the nursing home reported that it had an outbreak that took the life of one resident and put another in the hospital. Two employees also had tested positive and were self-quarantining, it said at the time.
The latest count at Crystal Rehab would account for the bulk of the nursing home-related COVID-19 cases in Leflore County.
Wednesday was the first public update the nursing home has given in the nine days since it first reported an outbreak. The disclosure came on the same day the Mississippi State Department of Health announced that Leflore County again had three long-term care facilities with an active COVID-19 outbreak.
Knowing where all these outbreaks are occurring, though, currently depends on the willingness of the facilities to acknowledge the problem publicly, since Mississippi is one of the states that decline to name them.
On Wednesday, the Commonwealth could not find any other Leflore County facility acknowledging a current outbreak. Two assisted-living facilities, Country Meadow and Indywood Glen, said they have yet to have either a resident or a staff member test positive for COVID-19. Golden Age nursing home, which previously had one asymptomatic carrier who has since tested negative, said it did not have a confirmed case presently.
A status report from the only other nursing home in Leflore County, Riverview Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, was not immediately obtainable. Scott Matthews, the nursing home’s administrator, was away from the facility, and an employee there said he would not be available for comment until Thursday.
The Department of Health has been putting increased attention on nursing home outbreaks. Although the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, residents who live in nursing homes are particularly vulnerable to the worst outcomes from the virus because they are elderly or in poor health. Some have described nursing homes as a “petri dish” for COVID-19, meaning that once an infection gets into one, it often spreads rapidly.
According to the Department of Health’s latest update, 74 long-term care facilities in Mississippi have at least one case of COVID-19, and almost a third of the 193 people who have died from the virus in the state were residents of these facilities.
In Leflore County, long-term care facilities have accounted for 24 of the county’s 113 cases of the respiratory disease, or 21%, and five of its 12 deaths, or 42%.
Last week, a representative of the Department of Health said that the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects patient privacy, bars the agency from naming the long-term care facilities with outbreaks. However, on Wednesday, Liz Sharlot, director of the Health Department’s Office of Communications, said that earlier explanation by an assistant was incorrect.
“HIPAA does permit listing the names of nursing homes with outbreaks but does not mandate it,” Sharlot said in an email. “A public health reason to give the name of a facility or business is the possibility of transmission, and we don’t know who potentially could have been impacted and thus might need testing or a vaccine, etc. ... In these nursing home cases, everyone that needs to know about a LTCF outbreak does know.”
Under state and federal guidelines, when a resident at a long-term care facility tests positive for COVID-19, the resident is isolated, and those who came into contact with the resident are tested and quarantined until the results come back. Other residents and their family members are supposed to be notified of the outbreak as well.
Other steps mandated by the Department of Health also have reduced the possibility of an infection within a nursing home being transmitted outside of it and thus further counter the argument to name the facility, Sharlot said.
“We stopped allowing visitors a while ago — so that is not a problem. Staff are temperature checked every day. Therefore, a decision was made to not announce as it might be stigmatizing.”
•Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
