Newsom pledges aid to nursing facilities
Governor says state is monitoring 191 sites in California with coronavirus outbreaks
Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged support Friday for nursing home patients suffering from the coronavirus, calling it his administration’s “top priority” and promising relief for beleaguered nurses and nursing assistants.
Newsom’s focus on nursing homes came as the death toll at a Hayward facility grew to nine Friday, the Alameda County Health Department reported. The total number of cases there grew to 66, including the people who have died. Also Friday, a third patient at Orinda Care Center died.
There are 1,224 skilled nursing facilities in California. New statewide numbers show 1,266 people who are either patients or work in 191 of those nursing homes have the virus, Newsom
said at his daily news briefing, and he promised more testing of others showing symptoms. Also of concern, he said, are 340 people who live or work in 94 board and care homes across the state who have tested positive for COVID-19. He did not provide locations.
“This state has a disproportionate number of aging and graying individuals, and we have a unique responsibility to take care of them and their caregivers,” he said, in his most extensive public remarks on the danger to nursing homes since the coronavirus crisis began.
Newsom said “SWAT teams” of infectious disease specialists would be sent to the homes where the virus is present and to some places he called “hot spots,” an apparent reference to places such as Gateway Care and Rehabilitation Center in Hayward and one in Riverside County, where the staff quit en masse, forcing the evacuation of patients.
Newsom also said that the state is monitoring the nursing homes with outbreaks and that more than 600 nurses had been sent to help the facilities. He said that state staff is in constant contact with them.
According to data compiled by the Bay Area News Group, as of Friday evening there were 21,336 positive tests for the coronavirus throughout California and 594 reported deaths. There are 4,724 cases and 129 deaths in the Bay Area.
Newsom said at least 2,897 patients who had tested positive were being treated in hospitals, a 2.5% increase from Thursday.
But state officials now believe
the peak numbers of patients hospitalized and requiring care in intensive care unit beds will be lower than initially anticipated and believe it will happen “in the month of May or even later,” though Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s secretary of Health and Human Services, noted that other projection models around the country show the peak will take place sooner.
Ghaly said open-source cellphone data around people’s movement has changed the projections for the anticipated surge in hospitalizations, because they show people are moving — and presumably spreading the virus — much less than expected.
“This is actually signaling to us that our peak may not end up being as high as we planned around and expected,” Ghaly said, crediting health orders on physical distancing for the updated outlook.
But the focus of Friday’s briefing was clearly on the plight of nursing home patients, workers and their families.
The state has sent 200,000 sets of gloves and 200,000 sets of N95 masks to nursing homes in hot spot areas to address shortages of personal protective equipment. At a news conference Thursday
in Contra Costa County, certified nursing assistants said they were reusing masks because stockpiles were short.
Newsom said that nursing home workers would be eligible for $500 stipends to supplement their pay, and the administration was working to pay for hotel rooms where they could spend their off-hours and avoid the potential of exposing family members to the deadly virus.
NBC News reported that there are more than 2,300 nursing home outbreaks in 35 states and calculated that 2,246 residents in long-term care facilities had died from COVID-19. In Washington state, where the health department has begun identifying nursing homes and assisted living residences with outbreaks, 163 facilities — or 1 in 5 — have reported at least one infection, according to the Seattle Times.
Mehrdad Ayati, a specialist in geriatric medicine who teaches at Stanford University, said he expects the additional testing Newsom promised will show many more patients carrying the virus.
“The number will be higher as they have not widespread tested all facilities,” Ayati said. “We will expect to have higher numbers in
the next week as the replication of this virus is six to 12 days.”
Ideally, Ayati said, public health officials would test everyone in nursing homes — those who are showing symptoms or not — and then separate those who have positive diagnoses from those who do not.
“They should do massive testing of the entire facility,” he said. “Whenever there is one case in any of these places, we have to assume there will be more.”
Union City Councilman Jaime Patiño, whose grandmother was a resident at Hayward’s Gateway Care and Rehabilitation Center for two years until Friday morning, when her cough worsened and she was rushed to Kaiser in San Leandro for care, called Newsom’s plan “a good start.”
“I would like to see action from the state in terms of taking over the management of these facilities,” he said Friday. “In a state of emergency, they could do that.”
Bay Area county health departments on Friday again did not release all the names of nursing homes where patients and staff have the virus, and Newsom offered no geographic breakdown behind the numbers he cited.
Dr. Sarah Rudman, Santa Clara County’s deputy health director, said Friday that 164 coronavirus infections have been found in nursing homes in the county, involving 114 patients and 50 staff members. But she declined to name the facilities.
At some homes, all patients and staff have been tested, Rudman said.
At the Orinda Care Center, where a third patient died Friday, a total of 51 people — 28 residents and 23 staff — have so far tested positive for the virus. The county filed a complaint about the home with the state health department. Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia said there were concerns whether the home, owned by a company in Los Angeles County, has enough staff and was capable of confronting the crisis.
In addition to the increased deaths at Gateway in Hayward, a spokesman for East Bay PostAcute Center in Castro Valley said the number of infections is now 34 — 19 patients and 15 staff. That’s up from a total of 31 on Thursday.