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SOUTH DAKOTA’S CORONAVIRUS SURGE IS TURNING NURSING HOMES INTO A ‘BATTLE ZONE’
The state has lost a greater share of its nursing home residents to COVID-19 than any other state this fall.
On October 9, an employee in the business office at Tieszen Memorial Home in Marion, South Dakota, tested positive for the coronavirus. She was sent home immediately, but three days later, a nursing aide and a housekeeper both tested positive.
Marion, a town of fewer than 1,000 residents, was experiencing a sharp uptick in cases — what scientists call community spread. It became more and more likely that the nursing home’s employees had become infected while, for example, grocery shopping.
On October 16, COVID-19 killed its first Tieszen resident. At that point, about thirteen of the home’s 55 residents had tested positive.
Nursing home administrator Laura Wilson called the days that followed the worst of her career.
“You almost feel like a battle zone,” she said. “We said, ‘You know, right now, we just need to survive.’”
South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has taken a notably relaxed approach to the pandemic. This autumn, months deep into this pandemic, nursing homes there have seen a larger share of their residents die than any other state.
At Jenkin’s Living Center in Watertown, 24 residents have died from COVID-19 since the last week of October — about a fifth of the residents there — data submitted to the federal government show. Thirteen patients at Weskota Manor in Wessington Springs — more than a third of its patients — died from COVID-19 this autumn, most of them in one week. Walworth County Care Center in Selby, a 50-bed facility, saw COVID-19 kill 12 patients this autumn, an administrator said. Overall, more than 40 percent of South Dakota nursing homes have lost a tenth or more of their patients to the coronavirus, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Nationwide, more than 100,000 residents of long-term care facilities have died of COVID-19, making up 38% of the nation’s virus deaths, according to The Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project, even though they represent less than 1 percent of the population.
The federal government has made protecting the elderly a priority, shipping millions of rapid tests to nursing homes across the country. Public health experts spent the first nine months of the pandemic perfecting strategies to keep the virus from spreading in close quarters. But, as researchers have learned, whether nursing home residents die from COVID-19 depends less on what happens inside than outside. Once COVID-19 permeates a town, there’s a limit to what nursing homes alone can do.
And that has made South Dakota an especially deadly place.
A LONG STRING OF DEATHS
During Tieszen’s outbreak, the nursing home was eerily quiet. On a normal day, “The Price is Right” might blare from a room, echoing down the hallways. But when the coronavirus hit, all the residents’ doors had to be closed to try to control the spread.
Before October, Tieszen had pandemic challenges but not mass tragedy. Wilson was forced to hunt for N95 masks on eBay, even though South Dakota is home to a 3M factory that makes them. She relied on her son, who works at Sam’s Club, to buy one pack of disinfecting wipes every day for the nursing home’s stockpile. Back when she was using lab-confirmed tests to screen her staff, she had trouble getting test results back within the time recommended by federal guidelines, as the Sioux Falls lab she had contracted with was swamped. And she says, like always, staffing was a problem: Tieszen told the federal government it was short on nurses and aides every week in October and November.
Wilson, who has worked at the nursing home for 42 years, said her staff did everything it could during the outbreak. Indeed, Tieszen, a small nonprofit that has earned five stars in the federal government’s nursing home quality rankings, passed three state inspections of its infection-control program between May and November, records show. It received roughly $70,000 in CARES Act incentive payments from the federal government in September based on good performance.
When the coronavirus hit, the nursing home dedicated two of its wings to COVID-19 patients, isolating them from other residents, until so many contracted the virus that they had to stay in their rooms. The entire nursing home, essentially, became a COVID ward. Wilson’s own 85-year-old father tested positive. Nurses worked overtime; Wilson put in 80-hour weeks and hired temporary help. Staff served residents’ meals on paper plates instead of dishes that might retain the virus. They conducted weekly audits of how often staff were washing their hands. They tested workers and residents at any sign of a sniffle, as well as regularly regardless of symptoms, using equipment shipped to the nursing home from the federal government. They followed up positive rapid test results with lab-confirmed PCR tests.
Despite all of these measures, the virus spread quickly.
The week after Tieszen’s first death on October 16, five more residents died, Wilson said. Among them was 89-year-old Maxine Ortman, a former teacher suffering from dementia whose husband would visit often, before the pandemic, from his home across the street.
The following week, seven more died.
In November, another seven died. They included 68-year-old Larry Johnson, a diabetic and former mechanic whose sense of humor and work ethic drew customers from all over northeastern South Dakota, his family wrote in his obituary.
And they included Randy Wieman, 64. He had Down syndrome, and died a week after testing positive for the virus, said his older sister, Carol Husby. He loved music, dancing and his many nieces and nephews. A normal December would find them celebrating Wieman’s birthday with chocolate cake.
“He would call me every morning to ask if I was up,” Husby said. “Randy was an amazing individual.”
In total, 20 residents died of the coronavirus — more than a third of those living at the Tieszen nursing home — in the space of five weeks.
OUT-OF-CONTROL SPREAD
Tamara Konetzka, a health researcher at the University of Chicago, has been studying the fate of nursing homes in the pandemic since the spring.
Her conclusion: “Nothing much has changed.”
Despite more testing and efforts to hone infection control practices, despite nine months of scientific study of the virus, nursing home residents are still at the mercy of their surrounding communities. “If they’re in virus hotspots, they’re going to be at risk,” Konetzka said. “The idea that we have found the secret to preventing nursing home cases and death is a little crazy.”
And this autumn, nearly all of South Dakota has been a hotspot. The state has ranked at or near the top of all 50 states in new coronavirus cases and deaths for months in reports issued to governors by the White House Coronavirus Task Force. During one week prior to Thanksgiving, South Dakota had 988 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents — more than double the national average. It had 19.6 deaths per 100,000 residents — the worst rate in the nation and more than six times the national average.
The state’s governor, Noem, is widely believed to have national political ambitions. She has proudly shunned strict measures to curb the virus.
“Rather than following the pack and mandating harsh rules,” she wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, “we ask all South Dakotans to take personal responsibility for their health …. The state hasn’t issued lockdowns or mask mandates. We haven’t shut down businesses or closed churches.”
Many South Dakotans have refused to wear masks or socially distance. In September, Wilson spoke at a meeting of local business owners in Marion and urged them to take mask-wearing seriously. She was met with blank stares.
“When I left that meeting I had basically resigned myself to the fact that I am living in a different world, and they don’t get it,” she said. “I’d be the only person in the grocery store with a mask on.”
Though limiting community spread is the best way to protect nursing homes, researchers said, some measures — especially having enough staff — can affect the severity of outbreaks. Here is where the federal government failed spectacularly, experts said.
“What they needed — damn it — they needed money for more staffing,” said Larry Polivka, executive director of the aging-focused Claude Pepper Center at Florida State University. “And they needed all of the PPE. They needed massive testing capacity as quickly as possible in the spring — they didn’t get it.”
Wilson said the South Dakota Department of Health was helpful when she called or emailed with questions. The state continued to inspect nursing homes for infection control practices, and just 14 South Dakota nursing homes were cited by inspectors for inadequate infection control between March and October, according to federal data. The state has a program to recruit retired nurses and doctors to help work in healthcare settings. The federal government sent a “strike team” to South Dakota in October to help nursing homes tackle the coronavirus, a spokesman for CMS said in an email, and federal officials have offered training and guidance.
But it’s unclear what else, if anything, South Dakota did to help nursing homes weather the brutal autumn. For nine weeks in October and November, on average, nearly a quarter of all nursing homes in South Dakota told the federal government they were short on nursing staff, far more than the 16 percent that did so nationwide. On average, more than 40 percent of South Dakota nursing homes reported shortages of aides, more than double the nationwide figure. And 13 percent of South Dakota nursing homes during that time reported shortages of PPE — roughly the same as did nationwide.
Policymakers of all stripes, even those who embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy and wish the virus to run free through the population, stress the need to protect long-term-care residents. Noem has not explicitly endorsed a herd immunity approach but has emphasized that the coronavirus is less likely to harm young people. She has acknowledged that the elderly face greater risks from the coronavirus.
Yet the governor’s spokesperson did not answer questions from the Center for Public Integrity regarding nursing homes or respond to requests for comment. Noem’s health secretary did not respond to a request for an interview. The South Dakota Department of Health declined to answer multiple emails sent by Public Integrity over multiple weeks. The state’s long-term-care ombudsman refused through an agency spokesman to answer questions. When pressed, the spokesman said he did not know the reason but was given orders to decline the interview.
Even supposed advocates for nursing homes are reluctant to speak about the toll the coronavirus is taking on South Dakota’s elderly. Two trade associations representing nursing homes in the state declined interviews. One of them, the South Dakota Health Care Association, recommended that a reporter speak to the state department of health instead. Another lobbyist, who wished to remain anonymous to avoid angering the Noem administration, said people fear upsetting the governor’s office, known for its guarded approach to dealing with the media.
The state also waited until September to decide how to spend nearly $600 million in CARES Act funding approved by Congress in March. Noem finally set aside $115 million for nursing homes and other local health providers. But nursing homes had to apply for the funding during an 11-day period in October and meet strict qualifications. Tieszen applied but was not granted funds. Documents from the South Dakota Legislature dated Dec. 7 show that 115 health care organizations applied for the funding, and 47 were approved. But just $1.9 million had been handed out as of Dec. 18. The state is now proposing another grant program to distribute the money to health organizations based on bed numbers.
But for many nursing homes, the money comes too late to save lives. South Dakota may be past the worst of this COVID-19 surge. New coronavirus cases in the state are on the wane; vaccines are perhaps weeks away for nursing home residents at Tieszen and elsewhere.
All told, the state lost roughly one out of every 10 nursing home residents to COVID-19, according to federal data.
“I don’t understand why people didn’t take it seriously right from the beginning,” Husby said. “It just breaks my heart because it didn’t have to be this way.”
Vaccine reserve was exhausted when Trump administration vowed to release it, dashing hopes of expanded access
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/01/15/trump-vaccine-reserve-used-up/
States were anticipating a windfall after federal officials said they would stop holding back second doses. But the approach had already changed, and no stockpile exists.
When Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced this week that the federal government would begin releasing coronavirus vaccine doses that had been held in reserve for second shots, no such reserve existed, according to state and federal officials briefed on distribution plans. The Trump administration had already begun shipping out what was available, starting at the end of December, taking second doses for the two-dose regimen directly off the manufacturing line.
Now, health officials across the country who had anticipated their extremely limited vaccine supply as much as doubling beginning next week are confronting the reality that their allocations will remain largely flat, dashing hopes of dramatically expanding access for millions of elderly people and those with high-risk medical conditions. Health officials in some cities and states were informed in recent days about the reality of the situation, while others were still in the dark Friday.
Because both of the vaccines authorized for emergency use in the United States are two-dose regimens, the Trump administration’s initial policy was to hold back second doses to protect against manufacturing disruptions. But that approach shifted in recent weeks, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
Operation Warp Speed, which is overseeing vaccine distribution, stopped stockpiling second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the end of last year, those officials were told. Shipping of the last reserve doses of Moderna’s supply, meanwhile, began over the weekend.
The shift, in both cases, had to do with increased confidence in the supply chain, so Operation Warp Speed leaders felt they could reliably anticipate the availability of doses for booster shots — required three weeks later in the case of the Pfizer-BioNTech product and four weeks later under Moderna’s protocol.
But it also meant there was no stockpile of second doses waiting to be shipped, as Trump administration officials suggested this week. Azar, at a briefing Tuesday, said, “Because we now have a consistent pace of production, we can now ship all of the doses that had been held in physical reserve.” He explained the decision as part of the “next phase” of the nation’s vaccination campaign.
Those in line for their second shots are still expected to get them on schedule because second doses are prioritized over first shots and states are still receiving regular vaccine shipments. But state and local officials say they are angry and bewildered by the shifting directions and changing explanations about supply. Their anxiety was deepened by projections that a highly contagious virus variant would spread rapidly throughout the United States and as daily covid-19 deaths averaged 3,320 this week.
The health director in Oregon, Patrick M. Allen, was so disturbed that he wrote Azar on Thursday demanding an explanation. In his letter, he recounted how Gustave F. Perna, the chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, had “informed us there is no reserve of doses, and we are already receiving the full allocation of vaccines.”
“If true, this is extremely disturbing, and puts our plans to expand eligibility at grave risk,” Allen wrote. “Those plans were made on the basis of reliance on your statement about ‘releasing the entire supply’ you have in reserve. If this information is accurate, we will be unable to begin vaccinating our vulnerable seniors on Jan. 23, as planned.”
HHS spokesman Michael Pratt confirmed in an email that the final reserve of second doses had recently been released to states but did not address Azar’s comments, saying only, “Operation Warp Speed has been monitoring manufacturing closely, and always intended to transition from holding second doses in reserve as manufacturing stabilizes and we gained confidence in the ability for a consistent flow of vaccines.”
But the explanations by the federal government were conflicting. The 13 million doses made available for states to order this week — for delivery next week — represented “millions more” than in previous weeks, Pratt said. He also said states have not requested the full amount they have been allocated.
Guidance circulated Friday among HHS officials acknowledged, however, that “the notion that there is a large bolus of second doses that will be released to jurisdictions is not accurate.” And state and municipal health officials said their allocations for next week had increased only marginally, if at all.
Chicago Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady said her city’s share had gone from about 32,000 doses to 34,000 doses. “I have stopped paying a whole lot of attention to what is being said verbally at the federal level right now,” she said.
Nirav Shah, the director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said he learned only Friday, by calling his state’s designated contact at Warp Speed, that the reserve no longer existed.
Maine still plans to broaden vaccination next week to those 70 and older. “Who is in line will not change,” Shah said. “The velocity of that line will change because this bolus of doses that we intuited was coming based on Azar’s comments is not coming.”
In an email that reached some state officials Friday morning, Christopher Sharpsten, an Operation Warp Speed director, called it a “false rumor” that “the federal government was holding back vaccine doses in warehouses to guarantee a second/booster dose.”
In fact, that information had come fromAzar, who said Tuesday that the “next phase” of the country’s vaccination campaign involved “releasing the entire supply we have for order by states, rather than holding second doses in physical reserve.”
Azar’s comments Tuesday followed a Jan. 8 announcement by President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team that his administration would move to release all available doses rather than holding half in reserve for booster shots. Biden’s advisers said the move would be a way to accelerate distribution of the vaccine, which is in short supply across the country.
Azar initially said the Biden plan was shortsighted and potentially unethical in putting people at risk of missing their booster shots. When he embraced the change four days later, however, he did not say that the original policy had already been phased out or that the stockpile had been exhausted. Trump administration officials and Biden’s team alike have sought to reassure the public that increasing the pace of immunizations would not endanger booster shots.
Azar also signaled to states that they would soon see expanded supply, urging them to begin vaccinating adults 65 and older and those under 64 with high-risk medical conditions. Officials in some states embraced that directive, while others said that suddenly putting hundreds of thousands of additional people at the front of the line would overwhelm their capacity.
In subsequent conversations with state and local authorities, federal officials sought to temper those instructions, said people who participated in the conversations. Perna, for instance, spoke directly to officials in at least two of the jurisdictions receiving vaccine supply, explaining that allocations would not increase and that they did not have to broaden eligibility as they had previously been told, according to a health official who was not authorized to discuss the matter.
The revised instructions led some state and local officials to hold off on changes. One state health official noted that the updated eligibility guidance announced Tuesday did not appear on the website of the CDC, even though it was stated as federal policy by Azar and by Robert R. Redfield, the CDC director, in their remarks. Under the original recommendations, adults 65 and older and front-line essential workers were to comprise the second priority group, known as Phase 1b, after medical workers and residents and staffers of long-term-care facilities.
There was additional confusion from another change Azar announced this week — making allocation of doses dependent on how quickly states administer them. He originally said that would not take effect for two weeks.
But Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) on Thursday tweeted that federal officials had notified him that the state would receive an additional 50,000 doses next week “as a reward for being among the fastest states” to get shots into arms. West Virginia, meanwhile, which is moving at the fastest clip, according to CDC data, did not get any additional doses, said Holli Nelson, a spokeswoman for the state’s National Guard.
In a sign that the incentive structure may not be long-lived, a senior Biden transition official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address ongoing deliberations, said this week that the team did not look kindly on a system that “punishes states.”
Biden has said he wants to see 100 million shots administered within his first 100 days — an aim that will depend on quickly accelerating the pace of immunization. Together, Pfizer and Moderna have agreed to sell 200 million doses to the United States by the end of March, which is enough to fully vaccinate 100 million people.
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Today’s Leadership Need
Large Numbers Of Health Care And Frontline Workers Are Refusing Covid-19 Vaccine
TOPLINE
Despite the Covid-19 death count in the United States rapidly accelerating, a startlingly high percentage of health care professionals and frontline workers throughout the country—who have been prioritized as early receipts of the coronavirus vaccine—are reportedly hesitant or outright refusing to take it, despite clear scientific evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective.
KEY FACTS
Earlier this week, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he was “troubled” by the relatively low numbers of nursing home workers who have elected to take the vaccine, with DeWine stating that approximately 60% of nursing home staff declined the shot.
Dr. Joseph Varon, chief of critical care at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center, told NPR in December more than half of the nurses in his unit informed him they would not get the vaccine.
Roughly 55 percent of surveyed New York Fire Department firefighters said they would not get the coronavirus vaccine, the Firefighters Association president said last month.
The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that hospital and public officials in Riverside, Calif., have been forced to figure out how best to allocate unused doses after an estimated 50% of frontline workers in the county refused the vaccine.
Fewer than half of the hospital workers at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, Calif., were willing to be vaccinated, and around 20% to 40% of L.A. County’s frontline workers have reportedly declined an opportunity to take the vaccine.
Dr. Nikhila Juvvadi, the chief clinical officer at Chicago’s Loretto Hospital, said that a survey was administered in December, and 40% of the hospital staff said they would not get vaccinated.
KEY BACKGROUND:
A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of healthcare workers were hesitant to receive the vaccine, citing concerns related to potential side effects and a lack of faith in the government to ensure the vaccines were safe. Frontline workers in the United States are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. The pandemic has taken an “outsized toll” on this segment of the population, which has reportedly accounted for roughly 65% of fatalities in cases in which there are race and ethnicity data. A study published by the journal The Lancet over the summer found “healthcare workers of color were more than twice as likely as their white counterparts” to test positive for the coronavirus. According to a Pew Research Center poll published in December, vaccine skepticism is highest among Black Americans, as less than 43% said they would definitely/probably get a Covid-19 vaccine. Dr. Juvvadi told NPR that “there’s no transparency between pharmaceutical companies or research companies — or the government sometimes — on how many people from” Black and Latino communities were involved in the research of the vaccine. Dr. Varon said that “the fact that [President] Trump is in charge of accelerating the process bothers” those individuals who refuse to be immunized, adding “they all think it’s meant to harm specific sectors of the population.” In an op-ed published in the New York Times earlier this week, emergency physicians Benjamin Thomas and Monique Smith wrote that “vaccine reluctance is a direct consequence of the medical system’s mistreatment of Black people” and past atrocities, such as the unethical surgeries performed by J. Marion Sims and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, best exemplifies “the culture of medical exploitation, abuse and neglect of Black Americans.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE:
“I’ve heard Tuskegee more times than I can count in the past month — and, you know, it’s a valid, valid concern,” said Dr. Juvvadi.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Friday interview that it’s “quite possible” the Covid-19 vaccine could be required for international travel and to attend school at some point in the future.
BIG NUMBER:
40 million. In early December, government officials said they planned to have 40 million doses available by the end of 2020, which would be enough to fully vaccinate 20 million Americans. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 3 million Americans have received the first dose of the vaccine, with 14 million doses have been distributed.
Operation Warp Speed at a crawl
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Monday that 2.1 million doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered in two weeks. While this might sound like an impressive number, it should set off alarms.
Let’s start with the math. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease doctor, estimates that 80 to 85 percent of Americans need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses. Eighty percent of the American population is around 264 million people, so we need to administer 528 million doses to achieve herd immunity.
At the current rate, it would take the United States approximately 10 years to reach that level of inoculation. That’s right — 10 years. Contrast that with the Trump administration’s rosy projections: Earlier this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar predicted that every American will be able to get the vaccine by the second quarter of 2021 (which would be the end of June). The speed needed to do that is 3.5 million vaccinations a day.
There’s reason to believe the administration won’t be able to ramp up vaccination rates anywhere close to those levels. Yes, as vaccine production increases, more will be available to the states. And Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at HHS, argued on Sunday that the 2.1 million administered vaccines figure was an underestimate due to delayed reporting. So let’s be generous and say the administration actually administered 4 million doses over the first two weeks.
But even that would still fall far short of the 3.5 million vaccinations needed per day. In fact, it falls far short of what the administration had promised to accomplish by the end of 2020 — enough doses for 20 million people. And remember, the first group of vaccinations was supposed to be the easiest: It’s hospitals and nursing homes inoculating their own workers and residents. If we can’t get this right, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the country.
Here’s what concerns me most: Instead of identifying barriers to meeting the goal, officials are backtracking on their promises. When states learned they would receive fewer doses than they had been told, the administration said its end-of-year goal was not for vaccinations but vaccine distribution. It also halved the number of doses that would be available to people, from 40 million to 20 million. (Perhaps they hoped no one would notice that their initial pledge was to vaccinate 20 million people, which is 40 million doses, or that President Trump had at one point vowed to have 100 million doses by the end of the year.) And there’s more fancy wordplay that’s cause for concern: Instead of vaccine distribution, the administration promises “allocation” in December. Actual delivery for millions of doses wouldn’t take place until January, to say nothing of the logistics of vaccine administration.
The vaccine rollout is giving me flashbacks to the administration’s testing debacle. Think back to all the times Trump pledged that “everyone who wants a test can get one.” Every time this was fact-checked, it came up false. Instead of admitting that there wasn’t enough testing, administration officials followed a playbook to confuse and obfuscate: They first attempted to play up the number of tests done. Just like 2 million vaccines in two weeks, 1 million tests a week looked good on paper — until they were compared to the 30 million a day that some experts say are needed. The administration then tried to justify why more tests weren’t needed. Remember Trump saying that “tests create cases” or the CDC issuing nonsensical testing guidance?
When that didn’t work, Trump officials deflected blame to the states. Never mind that there should have been a national strategy or that states didn’t have the resources to ramp up testing on their own. It was easier to find excuses than to admit that they were falling short and do the hard work to remedy it.
Instead of muddying the waters, the federal government needs to take three urgent steps. First, set up a real-time public dashboard to track vaccine distribution. The public needs to know exactly how many doses are being delivered, distributed and administered. Transparency will help hold the right officials accountable, as well as target additional resources where they are most needed.
Second, publicize the plan for how vaccination will scale up so dramatically. States have submitted their individual plans to the CDC, but we need to see a national strategy that sets ambitious but realistic goals.
Third, acknowledge the challenges and end the defensiveness. The public will understand if initial goals need to be revised, but there must be willingness to learn from missteps and immediately course-correct.
I remain optimistic that vaccines will one day end this horrific pandemic that has taken far too many lives. To get there, we must approach the next several months with urgency, transparency and humility.
