Then, Fire Capt. Michael Roth said the calls started to become more frequent -- two calls that first week, five in the second, seven in the third week, and 19 during the final week of March. Again and again, paramedics were returning to the same location -- the Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare
“Breathing problem. Priority one response,” the voice said through the station’s loudspeaker in early March, routing a rescue team to 1776 Cambridge Road.The two-story, yellow brick senior care center on a leafy street just northwest of Richmond, Va., would see over the ensuing weeks the worst loss of life from the novel coronavirus of any nursing home in the U.S. The first resident at the 140-bed home tested positive on March 18. By April 13, 42 residents had died.
MORE: With Trump eager to restart economy amid coronavirus crisis, experts implore feds for testing, tracing and a clear plan When Addington returned to Canterbury on March 16 to pack her mother’s room, she was denied entry. “A nurse packed her things and brought them down to me," she said. MORE: George Stephanopoulos reveals COVID-19 diagnosis weeks after wife Ali Wentworth tested positive
“It's hard to know in the week or two weeks prior to this [discovery] how much potential transmission had been taking place, and I think that's the real challenge that all of us are facing with COVID-19,” Avula said. “So many people are spreading the virus before you even have symptoms, and I think that's clearly what's happened there at Canterbury.”
Emergency crews called to Canterbury developed a strategy, Capt. Roth said: When the nursing home called 911 for a struggling resident, the dispatcher would ask staff to move the patient into the front lobby, “and actually bring them right to the door so that we're minimizing cross-contamination.” “And so at this point, I think, probably more than half of the residents who have who have passed away have done so at the facility and not gone to the hospital,” Avula said.
That’s what Bernice Stafford-Turner wanted to know, as she began sending letters to public officials. Her 68-year-old younger brother Fred Lee Stafford moved into the nursing home a little more than two years ago. He had been struck by a car when he was three, and was beset by significant developmental problems ever since.
Canterbury set up a toll-free phone number for relatives to call to check in on residents, and to schedule video calls, she said. But that form of communication does not work for everyone. Avula said Henrico County health officials began to consider that option once they knew from testing that 70% of the residents had been exposed.
In the absence of another solution, Stafford-Turner’s daughter, Precious, said she began trying to find other ways to get messages of comfort to her brother. Over Easter weekend, she set out dozens of bouquets of lilies into a display on the nursing home lawn, forming a heart that could be seen from her brother’s window. Precious planned a delivery Wednesday of carnations to the home – one for every resident inside.
Of the $100 billion Congress allotted for hospitals and medical facilities as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package, Spanberger and her colleagues said they wanted the agency to ensure that a quarter of those funds -- $25 billion -- would go directly to providing relief to skilled nursing and assisted living to address the “lack of health care workers” and “increased need for essential supplies” in these facilities.
“I'm really thinking that, if we want to do justice for the elderly, the helpless and the disabled, we really need to take the necessary steps to save their lives,” she said. That same admonition came after Canterbury reported the fortieth death of a resident on April 10, from the nursing facility’s medical director, Dr. Wright. He said that when this pandemic has passed, the American public may need to consider whether there is a better approach than to “warehouse our elders, and to put them in small spaces, to underpay their staff so that there are chronic staffing shortages.
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