COVID death is first at Glendale
Woman in her 80s is first resident to die from the virus
An 87-year-old woman who died earlier this week is the first resident at the Schenectady County’s nursing home to perish from coronavirus-related complications, County Manager Rory Fluman said.
He said Thursday that the woman, who had serious health issues and was in comfort care, which is similar to hospice, “passed away peacefully in her sleep” Wednesday at the Glendale Home.
“There were no extraordinary measures that would have been taken to save this woman’s life and unfortunately she was one of the 13 who had COVID,” Fluman said.
Since the start of the pandemic earlier this year, the county managed to keep the virus from infecting patients, but last week officials confirmed they were confronting their first outbreak.
All told, 13 residents and 12 staff at the Hetcheltown Road facility contracted the virus.
The home’s 195 residents underwent four rounds of COVID -19 testing, beginning around the Thanksgiving. Those who showed symptoms stayed in the isolation wing. Staff members at the nursing home were also tested.
The residents who have contracted the virus range in age from 60 to 90, Fluman said.
County officials initially blamed a dental hygienist for exposing residents to the virus but Fluman on Thursday clarified the situation, explaining “specifically linking or blaming the hygienist is [a] harder contract tracing thing to say but it’s definitely linked to to the latest outbreak.”
Fluman further explained that it appears that the dental hygienist likely had a false-negative test when she was first tested for COVID -19. Fluman said the tests have a 25 percent failure rate and the woman later tested positive for the virus.
“We were linking these cases to the hygienist because after she had a negative test, she had a positive test,” Fluman said.
He said the hygienist interacted with “a couple of the people who were positive,” leading contact tracers to determine “yes, it was probably this person.”
He went on to say, “for me the lesson is that these tests that we do for COVID, they are not 100 percent correct, so she was most likely positive and not knowing it because she had a failed test.”
The county manager said that the results of the most recent coronavirus
testing at the nursing home were reason for some optimism.
“We’ve had zero more cases so we’re very hopeful that we’ve ended the
expansion of the outbreak,” he said.