Pa. Senate Democrats hold hearing on coronavirus in long-term care facilities
Increased testing and better access to personal protective equipment (PPE) is needed to reduce coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in Pennsylvania.
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Julia Agos
Increased testing and better access to personal protective equipment (PPE) is needed to reduce coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in Pennsylvania.
Democratic members of the Pennsylvania Senate held a hearing Wednesday to gather testimony from local leaders, medical professionals and others familiar with the situation in some of the hardest hit facilities in the state. To date, nursing homes account for two-thirds of the commonwealth’s 3,100 coronavirus-related deaths.
They heard from Valerie Arkoosh, a medical doctor and chair of the Montgomery County board of commissioners, who warned that nursing home settings make it easy for the coronavirus to spread.
“We need to get some of these places connected to testing. Testing all the residents and in my view all the staff, because I don’t know how we get a handle on this without knowing everyone who’s positive,” Arkoosh said.
Arkoosh noted that hospitals often get first priority for PPE (i.e. masks and gloves), leaving nursing homes to fend for themselves. She also said nursing home staff were not trained on how to safely reuse PPE or how to properly fit an N95 mask until after the outbreak began.
State secretary of Health Rachel Levine addressed these concerns during a press briefing on Tuesday. “We are working with the nursing homes on making sure they have enough personal protective equipment and have instructions about how to use that personal protective equipment,” she said.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Lisa Boscola (D- ) called for an upgrade in training and pay for those who work in such facilities.
“The people who reside in these nursing homes, they built this country. Our veterans in these facilities risked their lives for our country during some of the darkest hours,” said Boscola.
More than 10,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in 502 facilities statewide, according to the Pa. Health Department.
The hardest hit mid-state counties are Berks, with 616 cases and 100 deaths at 21 facilities; and Lancaster, with 586 cases and 121 deaths at 27 facilities.
Some Senate Republicans have raised the question of whether or not nursing home statistics should even be included with the rest of the state’s case and death count. The argument being nursing homes are a special case and already quarantined from the rest of the population. And because nursing homes make up such a signifying portion of the death count, their numbers skew the data.
On Tuesday, Levine dismissed that approach: “We are not going to separate nursing home cases from other cases in counties. What we have certainly learned in the global pandemic of COVID-19 is that we are all interconnected. One section of our community, such as a nursing home or personal care home, impacts the general community, and the community impacts that facility.”
