The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Health secretary defends pandemic response in nursing homes
HARRISBURG » Pennsylvania’s health secretary on Friday defended her agency’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak inside the nursing homes and personal care facilities that account for almost 70% of the state’s nearly 6,600 fatalities.
Criticism from Republicans has been focused on the state’s policy that sent recovering patients back to nursing homes after being treated in hospitals. The policy was described as “deadly” in a letter sent Thursday to the state’s attorney general, signed by most of Pennsylvania’s Republican members of Congress.
Levine’s agency has said it was following a March directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Center for Medicare Services that nursing homes “should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present.”
The practice appears to have been routine across states, and no nursing home has stepped forward to say that it was forced to take a COVID-19 patient against its wishes.
Those patients have not been the main source of COVID-19 infections inside the facilities, Levine said — she thinks a more likely culprit is the homes’ own employees.
Levine said the numbers of nursing home and long-term care facility cases is proportional to the population density of the counties where they are located, and cited academic research that backs up her theory about how the coronavirus got inside the homes.
Levine said she was unsure why some facilities have been far more successful than others in limiting the damage once the virus got there.
“We don’t know, specifically,” Levine said, offering as theories that larger homes with more space have been better able to devote the room it takes to isolate infected patients.