Health experts report on their response to the COVID-19 outbreak in King County nursing homes.
Health experts from Public Health-Seattle and King County, EvergreenHealth, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used a March 27 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine to document the outbreak of COVID-19 in 30 nursing homes in King County, WA—and their response to that outbreak.
The first case of COVID-19 was identified on Feb. 28 in what the authors refer to as “Facility A.” By March 18, the COVID-19 outbreak included 167 confirmed cases affecting 101 residents, 50 health care personnel, and 16 visitors who were “epidemiologically linked to the facility.” Thirty long-term care facilities in King County reported at least one confirmed case of COVID-19 on March 18.
“Staff working in multiple facilities while ill and transfers of patients from one facility to another potentially introduced COVID-19 into some of these facilities,” write the authors. However, they maintain, “Publicly available information on staffing and quality measures shows no indication that baseline practices at Facility A placed residents at greater risk than residents at other similar facilities.”
The King County experience indicates that, once introduced into a long-term care setting, the coronavirus has the potential to spread “rapidly and widely,” conclude the authors.
“This can cause serious adverse outcomes among facility residents and staff, which underscores the importance of proactive steps to identify and exclude potentially infected staff and visitors, early recognition of potentially infected patients, and implementation of appropriate infection prevention and control measures. Lessons learned from this initial cluster can provide valuable guidance for long-term care facilities in other parts of the United States.”