2 area nursing home patients die of virus
Two residents of a Beaver County nursing home battling a large outbreak of COVID-19 have died, the home’s medical director said Monday.
The two residents of the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center who died were part of a group of now 19 residents who have tested positive for COVID-19 since Thursday, said Dr. David Thimons, medical director of the 589-bed nursing home.
“The two patients who died had advanced dementia and were already in hospice and passed away peacefully,” he said.
The 19 cases is up five cases from the 14 residents who had tested positive through Saturday.
“Most symptoms are mild to moderate,” the nursing home’s ownership said in a statement Monday.
Four patients are still being treated at Heritage Valley Beaver Hospital, Dr. Thimons said, but are “expected to come home soon.”
“They look so much better today it made me cry,” Dr. Thimons said Monday after doing telemedicine visits with all the patients, who are also being cared for in person by a physician and nurses.
Thirteen of the residents with positive results are still being cared for in a wing of the nursing home’s fourth floor east unit, which has been designated as the “COVID unit.”
Another 12 residents are also being cared for in the COVID unit, with their COVID-19 test results still pending.
One encouraging sign, Dr. Thimons said, is that they still have not had any other cases outside of the wing where the other cases have been detected.
He said the facility’s staff, including a physician, has been keeping all of the residents’ families up to date with phone calls — calls all the more necessary because visitors are not allowed into the building during the pandemic.
The families of residents “are taking it very well,” Dr. Thimons said. “The families feel very reassured.”
No family has tried to take any resident from the building, he said.
“This facility has done everything right,” he said.
The mystery remains how the coronavirus got into the nursing home, Dr. Thimons said.
“We just don’t know,” he said. “No visitors have been allowed in there for weeks,” and no staff members have yet tested positive for the disease.
The outbreak has strained resources at the nursing home, which
has put out requests for anyone possible to donate protective equipment, from N95 face masks to gloves, gowns and face shields, a request that has been made on social media by family and friends of residents and staff, many of whom now only have simple paper face masks to cover their faces.
Eric Brewer, director of Beaver County Emergency Services, said the Hospital Association of Pennsylvania put out a request to contribute protective equipment like gowns and gloves.
“We probably couldn’t help,” Mr. Brewer said. “Our stuff is running low here, too.”
Part of the reason for that is that all emergency services now routinely put on at least basic protective equipment like gowns, gloves, masks and eye covers any time they respond to possible respiratory illness, and for any call at Brighton Rehabilitation.
Mr. Brewer said the nursing home outbreak illustrates part of the problem for emergency responders in Pennsylvania: Because Beaver County does not have a health department, he has to rely on the state Department of Health to pass on information to him.
But that process is slow and reporters often know new numbers and problems before he and his staff do.
That included Monday, when the Post-Gazette called to ask him about his department’s response to the Brighton Rehabilitation outbreak and told him that two of the residents had died.
“Now, you see, there’s the problem: I’m hearing more from you than I’m hearing from the state,” he said.
Fortunately, he said, the nursing home and Heritage Valley have been good about calling and passing on most of the information about the problem, so medics and other emergency workers knew last week that the outbreak had begun as early as Thursday.
That’s important, he said “so we make [first responders] more cognizant of what they’re going into.”
Since Thursday, however, the nursing home’s outbreak “seems to have gotten much worse.”
A personal care home in Butler County, Concordia at the Orchard, announced late Sunday that a staff member had tested positive.
The part-time worker, who is not a direct caregiver, is isolated at home, according to Concordia Lutheran Services. The employee last worked at the home March 24 and displayed no symptoms.
“We are actively monitoring our residents for signs and symptoms of COVID-19 and are working with our local and state health departments. We have investigated the employee’s footprint at the facility to determine who he/ she came in contact with, and have notified our residents, their families and other Concordia at the Orchard employees. We will be following CDC guidelines regarding when the infected staff person will be allowed to return to work.”