A COVID-19 outbreak at a nursing home on Deer Isle has become one of the largest and deadliest in Maine since the March pandemic.
Sixty-two residents and 31 staff members at Nursing Home Island have tested positive for coronavirus in just over three weeks since the first case was detected. Twelve residents have died, Matthew Trombley, a senior executive at Nursing Home Island, said in a podcast on Tuesday.
“It was extraordinarily difficult,” Trombley said in the podcast.
The 93 cases make the outbreak of the fourth largest nursing home the state has seen since the beginning of the pandemic in March. Tomorrow, there have been 60 outbreaks of the virus in long-term care units since the spring.
Staff and administrators did “everything we could” to alleviate the spread of the disease since the first positive result of the nursing home’s COVID test on Nov. 23, Trombley said. This helped the nursing home prevent “a cataclysmic outcome as much as it could have been,” he said.
The facility is licensed for 38 beds in its specialized medical institution and has 32 additional beds in its care wing, where residents do not need medical or medical care.
Residents and staff members were offered counseling services to deal with the loss, Trombley said. The Maine National Guard attended the one-week drive with training and cleaning, but has not been to the nursing home since early December, he said.
On his Facebook page, nursing home officials said they determined by tracking contacts that an asymptomatic employee brought the virus after catching it in the community and going to work.
Robert Long, a spokesman for the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday that the source of the outbreak remains under investigation.
There have been more lethal outbreaks in nursing homes in Androscoggin, Cumberland, Kennebec, Waldo and York counties, although they have not been much more lethal. There have been 14 deaths associated with Durgin Pines in Kittery, which has seen a repeated outbreak of COVID-19 in the past month and a half after surpassing a smaller one in the spring and 13 each at Maine Veterans Home in Scarborough and Tall Pines in Belfast, according to the CDC in Maine.
The nursing homes with the highest number of cases are Russell Park Rehab and the Living Center in Lewiston, with a total of 159 employees and residents, Clover Health Care in Auburn with a total of 150 cases from two separate outbreaks, and Gray Birch in Augusta, which has had 101 cases. Twelve people died each at Clover Health Care and Gray Birch, while Russell Park had six COVID-related deaths.
The outbreak at Nursing Home Island erupted as the COVID-19 pandemic intensified in Maine and Hancock County. It was one of 14 new outbreaks of nursing homes and assisted living facilities the state saw in November, although state health officials said they saw a smaller proportion of COVID-19 cases in Maine. related to outbreaks. Tomorrow, there have been 17 outbreaks in long-term care units since the beginning of December.
About 165 residents of long-term care units died in outbreaks of COVID-19, accounting for nearly 60 percent of Maine coronavirus deaths.
Department of Health and Human Services inspectors visited the Deer Isle nursing home last week because of the outbreak, but findings from their visit have not yet been finalized, said Jackie Farwell, a spokeswoman for the department. The nursing home was found to comply with state rules during previous DHHS visits in June and September and to two off-site investigations in August.
Inspectors conducted the visit in June as part of a round of inspections to see if nursing homes comply with rules designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Federal health and pharmacy officials are expected to begin distributing COVID-19 vaccine doses to nursing homes in Maine starting next week. Long said the CDC in Maine has no indication that nursing homes with active outbreaks will have priority.