Elder advocates accuse the state of abdicating its responsibility to police nursing homes at a critical moment.
The alarming recent surge in COVID-19 cases appears to be driven at least in part by increases in infections among Californians ages 18 to 49.Like most states, California’s nursing home population has suffered a heavy toll due to the pandemic. As of Tuesday, 2,441 employees and residents of the state’s skilled nursing facilities had died of COVID-19, state data show.
In an announcement earlier this month, federal CMS administrators said more than 5,700 COVID Focused Surveys — roughly a quarter of them in California — were completed nationwide. They “When the inspector leaves the nursing home, things can change,” Verma said. “There’s some staff that may not be washing their hands at the frequency that we suggest, or in the situations that we suggest. There could be some lax practices around isolating patients.”
When the staff abandoned the facility the day after the inspection was completed, Riverside County health officials scrambled to evacuate all of the residents. A lawsuit filed last month by the family of a resident who died of COVID-19 alleges there was a serious outbreak at the facility by mid-March after an administrator contracted the disease and failed to test residents and staff.
Last year, state inspectors found 85 violations at Kingston Healthcare Center in Bakersfield, including failure to provide proper care for residents with rotten teeth and swollen, blackened toes. In 2018, inspectors found a resident’s oxygen filter clogged with thick brown debris.
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