Florida to care facilities: Do your own virus tests

Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees on Thursday encouraged the state’s elder-care facilities to do their own coronavirus testing of staff and residents or send their employees to the established drive-thru or walk-up sites to get swabbed.

The White House has been pressing states to get their elder-care facility residents and staff tested for the coronavirus to avoid more deaths. Florida’s governor has said he wants testing of the elderly, too, but made it clear this week that the state can’t make that happen anytime soon.

“Any nursing home or ALF in Dade or Broward, send your staff to these sites,” DeSantis said at a news briefing Thursday in

Doral. “I would say, send them there every two weeks. Run them through. It should just be a matter of course. We have the tests available to do it.”

DeSantis said state health officials in “strike teams” are going to longterm care facilities to test residents and staff. But the industry and senior organizations say the state’s efforts started too late and is not comprehensive enough.

Facility administrators have begged for weeks for more help keeping the virus out and have complained that the state has responded slowly to their calls for supplies and testing. Meanwhile, the number of deaths in these elder-care facilities continues to rise: The state on Friday reported an additional 30 COVID-19 deaths

involving residents or staff members of long-term care facilities. The new additions bring Florida to 844 COVID-19 deaths stemming from long-term care facilities, or 43% of the overall number of deaths in the state.

Data shows the state barely has made traction in testing. Only about 6% of the total 177,000 residents and 190,000 estimated staff have been tested since April 11, and most testers have been deployed to facilities only after an outbreak has occurred. DeSantis defended his team’s efforts by saying, “We are sending people to facilities but we’ve tended to go where the most acute need has been.”

“There are over 4,000 facilities in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Thursday. “So we have National Guard strike teams going in. The mayors are going to work with hospitals to be able to go in. I spoke this morning with the White House. They are going to send some of Admiral Giroir’s folks down. And, we are also working with some private providers to be able to do it.”

Giroir is the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tasked with providing emergency funding for nursing homes to pay for expanded testing, personal protective equipment and additional staff necessary to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this week, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, said all the 1 million nursing home residents need to be tested within the next two weeks as well as the staff. Nationally, more than 27,000 residents and staff have died from outbreaks of the virus at the nation’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

At his Friday news conference in Jacksonville, DeSantis echoed his earlier statements, saying that workers from long-term care sites should take advantage of the drive-thru and walk-up testing centers throughout the state. As for the residents of those facilities, he said the state could provide lab capacity and supplies for the sites to do their own tests.

AARP’s Florida State Director, Jeff Johnson, has issued a statement of concern about the state’s reopening and its impact on seniors.

He said the state’s method of spot testing is not enough, particularly as Florida reopens: “To ensure that Florida communities continue to avoid the surge in hospitalizations that has crippled other parts of the world, AARP Florida strongly recommends that state leaders mandate a regimen at longterm care facilities that tests workers regularly for the virus before they enter a facility. On-site, quick-turn testing can best prevent the coronavirus from being introduced to fragile longterm care residents.”

Thursday afternoon, state Surgeon General Scott Rivkees addressed administrators of Florida’s long-term care facilities and also encouraged them to send their workers to the existing drive-thru and walk-up sites. Rivkees said about 4% of the workers that have been tested thus far have been positive. But all it takes is one positive staff member to introduce the virus into a nursing home. Records as of Friday show about 1,800 staff members are infected.

“We’re in the process of expanding testing, but we have 190,000 workers and 150,000 residents. That’s a large number to test,” Rivkees told administrators. He said his staff will be reaching out to see if each home has nursing staff to do the sample collection if the state provides them materials.

He also encouraged administrators to hire private companies to do testing, as long as they provide the state their results. “This [testing] is a high priority,” Rivkees said, adding that the state’s sample collectors themselves may not all have been tested, but are having their temperatures taken.

This week, the state began requiring nursing homes and assisted living facilities to report how many workers they employ and how many have been tested. A new rule says if the state strike team shows up at a site, all workers must be tested. Testing is no longer voluntary for workers at the sites the state visits.

Early in the pandemic, hospitals played a key role in the long-term care facilities’ efforts to keep the virus out and test nursing home residents. Hospitals wanted to send residents back who no longer needed care, but still had the virus. Nursing homes pushed back, wanting residents to be tested and cleared of the virus before they returned.

On Thursday, Mary Mayhew, secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration, emphasized her efforts to keep residents with the virus out.

“We have issued emergency rules to require hospitals to test all individuals discharged. We want to make sure we are taking every precaution to ensure the virus is not introduced back into the facility,” she said.

The reverse is true as well. Hospitals are now taking long-term care residents who test postive, even if they don’t exhibit symptoms.

Since Sunday, health officials have been mass-transferring residents who are positive out of elder-care facilities with outbreaks and into nearby hospitals, regardless of whether they need hospital-level care. Mayhew told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that as the state began to collect more data, it recognized where they had problems and removed residents in facilities that could not properly isolate or monitor them.

Both Mayhew and Rivkees said there is no plan to allow visitors into long-term care facilities or to resume group activities at this time.

Also on Thursday, lawyers at Morgan & Morgan announced the firm is preparing lawsuits against two Florida nursing homes — Suwannee Health and Rehabilitation Center in Live Oak and Opis Coquina Center in Ormond Beach — that have had 34 combined deaths from COVID-19 in their facilities.