As Allegheny County prepares to administer a COVID-19 vaccine at Kane Community Living Centers, the county is eyeing building design changes meant to thwart the spread of the disease at the four senior living facilities that are home to hundreds of residents.
Inoculation of residents and staff by CVS Health personnel will begin next Monday with the first of two shots to be given at the Kane center in Ross and continue at the Glen Hazel center by mid-week. Vaccination at the Scott and McKeesport facilities will be the following weekend.
Some 930 staff members will be offered the Pfizer-BioNTech preparation — one of two COVID-19 vaccines to clear federal regulatory hurdles — along with 728 residents of the four-center county-owned skilled and personal care facilities. Among the biggest outbreaks of the disease in the past year were at larger, county-owned facilities, including the Kane centers in Glen Hazel and Scott.
At a briefing Tuesday, Kane center director Dennis Biondo said most of the county’s facilities were older style, with double-occupancy rooms.
The design “may have been among the contributing factors to the outbreaks,” Mr. Biondo said. Kane chief medical officer Mario Fatigati said design was “really something we have to look at” after the pandemic has been tamed.
The county, which has banned visitation at the facilities since the outbreak began in March, reported 17 active resident cases of COVID-19 at the Ross facility with six deaths to date. In addition, 15 employees were actively infected, bringing the total number of staff infected to date to 37.
The Scott facility had the biggest outbreak of the Kanes so far, with 136 residents infected and 21 deaths earlier in the year, according to the county. An additional 89 people were infected at Glen Hazel with 19 deaths.
As of Monday, there were no active COVID-19 cases among residents at Scott and only one resident case at Glen Hazel, according to the county. Statewide, COVID-19 deaths in long-term care facilities made up 56.2% or 8,633 of the total 15,353 deaths from the disease as of Tuesday, according to the state health department.
Nursing homes across the country have also been hard hit by the disease and are welcoming the arrival of vaccine shipments. Staff and residents at hundreds of Pennsylvania nursing homes began receiving shots Monday, according to the state health department.
Earlier this year, big outbreaks also were reported at Westmoreland Manor, a facility in Hempfield owned by Westmoreland County, and Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center, a nursing home formerly owned by Beaver County.
Separately, Allegheny County’s vaccine roll out includes an effort to contact independent practice physicians to arrange for them to get vaccinated. The Allegheny County Medical Society is helping coordinate the shots by county health personnel, which were expected to be done by the end of January, medical society CEO Jeremy Bonfini said.
But the problems at the county-owned facilities may not be over.
The Kane centers — named after former Pittsburgh city council member, Allegheny County commissioner and state Rep. John J. Kane who died in 1961 — began with the opening of the sprawling 2,100-bed John J. Kane Hospital in Scott in 1958. Later the hospital was replaced with four 360-bed facilities surrounding Pittsburgh.
Even though the four replacement facilities — which contain skilled personal care and independent living units — were smaller than the original hospital, their size may have been a factor in spreading the highly contagious COVID-19.
The Kane center in Ross, for example, which was built in 1983, is a four-story, 172,000-square-foot concrete block structure.
Such facilities “where older residents live in close quarters and often have high levels of impairment and chronic illness ... can lead to greater infection rates and mortality,” according to a study by the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine in September.
The close contact makes isolating the virus more difficult.
“Most of those places are horrendous,” said Martin Siefering, co-leader in the senior living practice of design firm Perkins Eastman of New York City. “If one person gets COVID-19, it would be very difficult for someone sharing the room not to get it. And once it gets in, it spreads very easily.”
Larger facilities often have higher populations of seniors on Medicaid, the state-federal health care plan for low-income and disabled residents that does not cover the full cost of providing care, Mr. Siefering said. These facilities are then essentially starved for money to spend on upgrades.
Among the Kanes’ 728 residents, 88% were covered by Medicaid, according to Allegheny County spokeswoman Amie Downs.
New models of nursing homes — with limits of 12 to 14 residents, each with private rooms and baths and dedicated caregivers — reduce the risk of infection and improve the quality of life, Mr. Siefering said.
”There are new models of nursing homes that have been very successful against COVID-19,” he said.
Kris B. Mamula: kmamula@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699
Updated at 6:21 p.m. on Dec. 29, 2020
First Published: December 29, 2020, 7:42 p.m.
