As deaths mount, LA County far behind on promise to test everyone in nursing homes.
A month after vowing to test all nursing home residents and staff for the novel coronavirus, Los Angeles County health officials have completed the effort in only about a third of homes and have dramatically scaled back testing plans.
The COVID-19 death toll at county residential facilities topped 1,000 this week, with the vast majority at nursing homes.“More people will die than necessary based on this policy,” said Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California Assn. of Long Term Care Medicine, which represents doctors, nurses and others working in long-term care facilities.
Facilities with no known cases of COVID-19 have been instructed to test 10% of residents every week, in the hope that will be sufficient to catch and control an outbreak before it gets out of hand. “Let’s say you have 100 people in a facility and you test everyone and find that five are positive. Well, you can do something about that,” Wasserman said. Residents would get quarantined, and employees would get sent home or assigned to work only with residents who have also tested positive.
It’s not clear why the county changed its approach. Experts say fear of bad publicity and the cost of the tests could have been factors. Nursing home operators were initially concerned about the stigma of discovering a COVID-19 case and winding up on the
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