The Beaver County nursing home where the number of positive cases and deaths from COVID-19 continues to increase almost daily is now going to presume that all 450 residents and more than 300 staff “may be positive” for the disease, the nursing home said Monday.
“Upon consultation with the Department of Health, and consistent with practices of facilities on the cutting edge of prevention and treatment, we are beginning to shift away from counting test results, and presuming all staff and residents may be positive,” a press release from Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center said in part. “Thinking about the virus in this way allows us to be more protective of asymptomatic staff and residents.”
The move by Brighton Rehabilitation to assume everyone has the coronavirus appears to make it the first facility or location in the state to take such a step.
Asked if hospitals near the nursing home could handle a dramatic surge in cases, state Department of Health spokesman Nate Wardle wrote in an email reply: “We believe that our hospitals, particularly in the western part of the state would be able to handle an increase of cases, if needed.”
The move by the nursing home comes four days after it stopped reporting the number of case totals and deaths as they continued to climb last week, along with the number of residents being cared for in the local hospital.
There have now been at least 42 positive cases - based on a figure provided Friday by the union representing most of the employees - and at least five deaths among people who were infected by COVID-19.
The nursing home’s decision last Thursday to stop reporting the daily increase in cases occurred about the same time the home appears to have detected at least one case on a different floor from prior cases.
A companion of a resident in the home said that on Wednesday, the day before the nursing home stopped reporting numbers of cases, the nursing home said the resident tested positive for COVID-19. That resident does not live in the fourth floor East unit - a lockdown unit where most of the residents have dementia or some other behavioral health issue - where all the other cases were reported to have occurred.
The nursing home management had hoped they caught the outbreak and contained it to that unit alone.
As recently as last Wednesday, the nursing home’s press release stated that all of the infected patients to that point all were “within the affected wing.”
The resident’s companion, who did not want to be named because the resident still lives there and they were concerned it would be harder to get information, said the fact that there was an outbreak there is not a surprise to anyone who regularly visits Brighton Rehabilitation.
“That place is terrible,” the companion said. “It’s filthy, dirty.”
The companion said what she wants to know is how the outbreak began.
“But when you ask those kinds of questions, [the staff] just don’t answer,” the companion said.
Keri Boyer, whose father, Earl Denbow Jr., 73, of Patterson, died Wednesday after contracting COVID-19, said she wasn’t surprised when the outbreak began in the building.
“I kind of figured it was going to happen sooner or later,” she said. “It’s not the cleanest of facilities. … And there are always people going in and out all day.”
She said it was evident the facility was understaffed and that that had to play some role in the outbreak.
“It wasn’t like these people weren’t working; they worked hard,” she said of the staff. “I just think it was too much for them to keep up with” to clean and care for all the residents.
Her father, a laborer at a cement plant on Neville Island, had been at the nursing home for two years after developing Parkinson’s and kidney disease.
She said she had not seen her father except on regular video chats on a nurse’s aide’s phone, since March 12, when the nursing home and all nursing homes across the state were put on lockdown with no visitors allowed except, if possible, end of life visits.
He seemed to have been doing well. But on Friday, March 27, she got a call from the home saying that they had a positive COVID-19 case and her father was being tested. Later that same day they said he tested positive, too.
They called again that weekend and said he wasn’t feeling well and had a fever. By Sunday, March 29, they called to say he had been moved to the nursing home’s hospice care.
By Wednesday, they called to say he was declining and they were giving him comfort medication. He was only slightly coherent, but a nurse’s aide held her phone to Mr. Dembow’s ear so his daughter could tell him goodbye.
He was never put on a ventilator or sent to the hospital, a choice the family discussed.
“A ventilator wasn’t going to help my dad,” Ms. Boyer said. “He was either going to die alone in the nursing home or die alone in the hospital. I figured at least he knew the nurses at the nursing home and that would be better.
“I still don’t know if that was the right decision,” she said. “But it was the decision we made.”
Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill
First Published: April 6, 2020, 10:16 p.m.
