Western Pa. care home avoided COVID for months until Nov. 4

Until November, it had been a point of pride at Concordia of Franklin Park outside of Pittsburgh that the personal care home did not have a single case of COVID-19 among its staff or 70 residents.

That all changed after a staffer tested positive Nov. 4 — and within a week, 30 residents tested positive, while the virus raged through the building’s four units. By the end of November, nine residents had died and 50 tested positive — most of the building’s population — along with nearly a quarter of its staff of roughly 80. Then, last week, the home reported that three more residents had died from the disease.

Those three deaths brought the total to 12, making the outbreak at the North Hills facility the deadliest so far at personal care and assisted living homes in Western Pennsylvania. While nursing homes have garnered most of the attention during the pandemic, the deaths at Concordia of Franklin Park underscore the breakdowns that can happen in homes that cater primarily to people who require less medical care.

State records show that personal care and assisted living homes in Pennsylvania have had anywhere from 769-1,279 deaths, and perhaps even more because of an imprecise reporting system. A nursing assistant who worked at Concordia of Franklin Park until recently said the outbreak could have been avoided or limited if the home had taken some of the most basic precautions.

“Residents weren’t required to wear masks when they came out of their rooms. They allowed outside visits, and people were supposed to wear masks and take precautions, but families didn’t always comply,” said the former nursing assistant, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation at her new job.

Perhaps the biggest breakdown, the nursing assistant said, was that shifts were determined daily, and that each day when they started work, “It was a scramble to see where you were going to work, which meant crossing units and floors day-today.”

Moving to different units and floors has been identified in studies and other outbreaks as a major problem in spreading the disease because infected staff members can spread the virus to residents and other workers throughout a facility. Some staffers suggested that they be assigned to the same units or floors, she said, but building officials would not change the system.

The nursing assistant said staff suspected the outbreak may have begun after a family member of a new resident entered the building to help set up the person’s room.

Concordia officials said the Franklin Park facility did everything it could to prevent an outbreak, and what happened there was unfortunate but came at a time when COVID-19 cases were rising dramatically all over the region.

“Can I say that I think Franklin Park was doing something wrong there? No,” said Hope Rouda, executive director for personal care for Concordia Lutheran Ministries, which has 11 other personal care homes in Allegheny and Butler counties, as well as five nursing homes in the region.

“COVIDis very contagious and there’s a lot of other facilities out there in the community dealing with the same thing, trying to catch a tiger by the tail and get it under control,” she said.

She denied that moving between floors or units at Franklin Park was “routine” and said the only time that might occur is on the night shift, when staffing is at its lowest, “and that’s true in most [senior living] buildings.”

As for people in the facility routinely crossing into rooms and floors, Concordia spokesperson Frank Skrip responded in an email that “we have to question the bias and validity of statements made by an unnamed former employee.”

Like Rouda, he said staff at Franklin Park regularly work the same areas, but added: “Like all providers, especially during the pandemic and now cold/ flu season, call-offs do create a challenge to this general rule, despite our staffing numbers that are always beyond the required levels. To say that the virus spread in the building for that reason would be speculative.”

As for the nursing assistant’s description of a family member helping a resident move in, Skrip said relatives had been allowed since late October to help set up rooms.

Concordia bought the 100-bed Franklin Park facility in 2012 — then known as Pristine Pines of

Franklin Park — along with an assisted living facility in Wexford from a private equity firm for $7.8 million. The 12 deaths at the Franklin Park facility represent the 16th deadliest COVID-19 outbreak among the state’s 1,206 personal care and assisted living homes.

Assisted living and personal care homes generally have healthier, more mobile and less fragile residents than nursing homes, and they operate under separate regulations from nursing homes, with less medical help required. The former nursing assistant said the facility regularly had more vulnerable residents than they should have for the staffing.

In many units well over half the residents could require extra care beyond the “assisted” level, because of some infirmity with either mobility, dementia or other problems, she said.

In the state’s last inspection of Franklin Park, in November 2019, it reported that among the 71 residents, 18 required help with their mobility and six had a physical disability. Though nursing home deaths have made up the bulk of the state’s 6,900 COVID-19 deaths in all senior living facilities, state data last week showed that deaths in personal care and assisted living homes may have reached at least 1,279. Exactly how many is unclear. The state does not break out assisted living and personal care homes from the daily figure of deaths at senior living facilities.

In the weekly update of facility-by-facility deaths, the state Department of Human Services, which oversees the homes, lists an asterisk if a facility has had one to four deaths, and 170 of the homes are in that category. On top of that, as of last week, 577 assisted living and personal care homes had reported no data to the state.

A family member of one of the Franklin Park residents whodied said she was stunned to learn how many residents had become infected and died. “They have not told us anything about what is happening in the building,” the family member said.

While Concordia, like some other senior living facilities, has regularly provided updates online about how many “active” cases of COVID-19 they have, the website does not include a running total and never mentions how many people have died. Skrip said using active case counts — currently zero on the