SALT LAKE CITY — As our troubling trend in Utah continues on course for over 1000 positive cases of COVID-19 a day, the impacts could be very dangerous to populations in long term care facilities.
All of the following Stats can be found at www.coronavirus.utah.gov.
These long-term care facilities were hit hard and early in the states pandemic and accounted for a lot of the early deaths but as the numbers have leveled out and now are spiking again these facilities are again on the rise.
Of the 500 grim milestone the state reached on Thursday 212 of them were people who were residing in longterm care facilities at the time of their death.
As a cross section on Thursday October 8th alone, of the 5 total deaths, 3 were from people in long term care facilities.
It's even further emphasized by the number of facilities that have COVID outbreaks currently, On September 15th there were 21 now there are 51 in less than a month's time.
“The age distribution of new cases is now spreading over all adult age groups it's no longer a surge in our 15 to 24-year-old's” state epidemiologist Angela Dunn said in the weekly update to the states COVID-19 response emphasizing that what was a few weeks ago isolated to a specific age group has now spread much wider.
The White House Coronavirus task force sends out weekly reports to each state as a part of their mission to inform health departments of their findings and recommendations.
The latest report still lists Utah in a “Red Zone” for our case counts but also singling out long term care facilities as an issue that the state needed to be aware of.
In the summary of findings on the state one bullet point reads “During the week of Sep 21 -Sep 27, 7% of nursing homes had at least one new resident COVID-19 case, 31% had at least one new staff COVID-19 case, and 1% had at least one new resident COVID-19 death.”
Going on to their recommendations on the topic the report reads “...Any nursing homes with 3 or more cases of COVID per week over any of the past 3 weeks (facilities in Logan, Heber, Draper, American Fork, St. George) should have mandatory inspection surveys conducted and immediate support for corrective action…”
The state also has put out lists of facilities that currently have over 5 new positive cases in their patients, right now there are 5:
Draper Rehabilitation and Care Center - Nursing Home
Midtown Manor - Nursing Home
Sagewood at Daybreak - Assisted Living
Hurricane Health and Rehabilitation - Nursing Home
Laurel Groves Assisted Living Center - Assisted Living
But the states website does show an overwhelmingly positive statistic and that is of the over 550 total facilities that at one point had a COVID-19 positive test, 461 of those have been resolved.