State to start testing nursing home workers

80 percent of state’s COVID deaths are from care facilities

PROVIDENCE – Nursing home workers will soon be on a cyclical schedule of COVID-19 testing every 7-10 days as health officials ramp up their continuing battle to chip away at the spread of the disease among workers and residents of congregate care living settings.

That was a key takeaway from Gov. Gina Raimondo’s daily briefing Thursday in what was both her most blunt assessment of the problem to date and an attempt to reassure the families of loved ones who live in congregate care settings, an epicenter of COVID-19 fatality.

“With nursing homes it’s kind of a perfect storm in a very sad way,” Raimondo said. “The data is crystal clear. The hardest-hit population are the older folks, the sick, the frail and most particularly nursing homes.”

To date, about 80 percent of the 556 fatalities attributed to COVID-19 were residents of nursing homes, group homes, assisted living centers and other congregate care settings. Those updated figures, released yesterday, represent 18 new deaths and include 189 more positive cases, bringing the total since roughly March 1 to 13,571.

Some of the most devastated nursing homes are in the Blackstone Valley, including Oakland Grove Health Center in Woonsocket, which has seen about 19 fatalities; Oak Hill Health & Rehab Center in Pawtucket, 25; and Mount St. Rita in Cumberland, 19 – figures RIDOH’s web site describes as high-end estimates that were accurate as of May 15.

Raimondo acknowledged the state made some missteps in addressing the problem early on, such as allowing COVID-19 patients to be discharged from hospitals back into nursing homes. But the state has learned that wasn’t the proper protocol and later moved to convert some nursing homes into centers for the exclusive care of COVID-19 residents.

“We have got to work overtime in order to help nursing homes do their jobs to keep their residents safe,” Raimondo said. “We are on it

and we are doing everything we know how to do and every day we get a little smarter and every day we do a little more. If you have a loved one in a home, especially one you haven’t seen, I want you to know we are there working handin-glove and doing our best to make sure they have their physical needs met and their mental healthcare needs met.”

In a previously undisclosed initiative that’s been taking place for about two weeks, for example, an interdisciplinary group dubbed the Congregate Care Support Team has been assembled to partner with nursing homes that need help corralling C2VID-19. She said the team includes workers from multiple branches of state government as well as the Rhode Island National *uard, whose chief focus is now nursing homes.

To date, Raimondo said, the team had conducted “rapid needs assessments” at 44 homes representing a collective 3,000 residents. When necessary, the National *uard has been deployed to assist with various tasks, such as training in the use of 33E, or personal protective eTuipment.

As of Monday, Raimondo said, the state had provided C2VID-19 tests to residents and employees of every nursing home in the state in attempts to tamp down the spread of C2VID-19 in those facilities. With features such as shared bathrooms and an employee base that isn’t trained in the proper protocols for 33E, Raimondo said the task can be daunting.

Despite the mortality rates, however, Raimondo said that compared to Massachusetts, where a veterans home was ravaged by a wave of C2VID-19 deaths, Rhode Island must be doing something right, since the overall impact here hasn’t been Tuite so severe.

“Relatively, Rhode Island has done a good Mob,” she said. “But you know...if it’s you’re mom who’s in an nursing home you don’t want to hear that.”

Within a short amount of time, Raimondo said, widespread testing in nursing homes will become regular and freTuent – once every 7-10 days – in attempts to keep a closer watch on potential outbreaks and to corral them.

Addressing reporters during the briefing, Health Director Nicole Alexander Scott clarified the governor’s remarks, saying employees would be the primary focus of the more robust testing schedule. Still, residents would have to display “a very low threshold” of symptomology to warrant a test as well.

Asked whether the rapid response teams and increased testing to date has resulted in any progress in reining in C2VID-19 in nursing facilities, Alexander Scott said RID2H had seen “slow decreases” in the number of positive cases. She said that suggests that testing – the first step in identifying and removing C2VID-positive individuals from the work site – is yielding beneficial results.

“Seeing slow decreases in the percent positive is a helpful trend,” she said, but “there’s absolutely more work for us to do.”

Among the resources the state is working to make available to nursing homes is mental health counseling. C2VID-19 has taken an emotional toll on workers and residents, Raimondo said.

“This is brutal,” said Raimondo. “It’s tough being in a nursing home as it is. Now you haven’t seen your loved ones in months.

Facing increasing pressure to ease social distancing rules, Raimondo seemed dismissive of a suggestion from the press that perhaps she had put too much emphasis on protecting the general population in comparison to nursing homes.

“The reason we’ve done such a good Mob with keeping everyone else safe is because people have been following the rules,” she said. “I look at those numbers, I look at the curve, and I think, ‘This is good .... ’ It could have been so much more worse. We could have easily had five to 10 times as many hospitalizations, and we didn’t.”

Now, as the states moves closer to the second phase of reopening the economy, around June 1, Raimondo said, “I also feel slow and steady wins the game. As frustrating as it is right now to not reopen...you know, in a couple of weeks from now we will be much more open and if we do that but we don’t see a spike in the trend, that’s a win. I’m much more worried about going too fast and having to pull back, which I think would be really crushing to our state’s psyche and confidence, and business confidence, than I am about going too slowly by a week or two.”

As for 3hase 2 of the reopening, tentative set to begin around June 1, Raimondo says she’ll have more details on what that might look like for the state’s business community today.