Southern Illinois town devastated by November outbreak - The Washington Post

In late September, before covid-19 swept through southern Illinois like a prairie fire, before nearly every single resident of a nursing home in Du Quoin was infected, before the disease pushed Perry County’s rural health-care system to the breaking point, confidence was in the air.

Department of Health and Human Services awarded the nursing home a $19,000 incentive grant recognizing its superior infection-control procedures, one of thousands of such grants across the nation.

“We had a really long grace period,” said Amy Blakemore, the medical-surgical nurse manager at the hospital.

But when it became real, spreading across the Midwest, filling hospitals to capacity, many nursing homes found that good infection control on paper was no match for an insidiously contagious virus.

The inspection system for American nursing homes left them ill-equipped to deal with the novel coronavirus and, in far too many cases, blind to the threat.

At the moment of crisis, a lack of hospital space forced nursing home staffers to take on the burden of covid-19 care — an obligation many shouldered with heroic dedication, but lacked proper equipment and training to fulfill.

What happened at the Fairview Rehabilitation and Healthcare center, where the coronavirus infected 42 residents and killed a quarter of them, was not an exception.

Each of those nursing homes received incentive grants from HHS in the fall for good infection control, ranging from $34,000 to $69,000.

Health-care workers and nursing home staffers and administrators understood the need for vigilance.

Alongi, whose family has run a restaurant in Du Quoin since 1933, said residents had asked him to somehow countermand an Oct.

[Profit and pain: How California’s largest nursing home chain amassed millions].

Louis metropolitan area, sent her by cab to a local nursing home two days later.

Walston was too feeble to go home, but Short was deeply disturbed by the conditions she found at the nursing home.

26, an ambulance took her to the Fairview nursing home, a one-story brick building in Du Quoin across the street from a company that manufactures commercial holiday decor.

Louis metropolitan area where Walston had lived and worked, Short hoped the staff would have the time to do what they could to make her mother’s life as meaningful as possible.

A nursing home about 13 miles away, also operated by Stout’s company, had 46 confirmed cases and three deaths during an outbreak in August.

Stout said he and the staff at his firm, WLC Management, ran through many scenarios to think through how to avoid a repeat occurrence.

Stout said he was frustrated by the constantly changing advice from federal and state health agencies.

Stout, 49, studied to be a mortician before he went into the nursing home business, and also owns a bar-and-grill.

WLC operates 11 nursing homes and one assisted-living center in southern Illinois, and they get high marks from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that regulates nursing homes.

Yet a deeper dive into the reports compiled on every nursing home in the United States shows that in 2019, Fairview rehabilitation patients were 20 percent more likely than the average to return to the hospital for treatment, and were more than four times as likely to be treated with antipsychotic medications.

Blakemore, the nurse manager at Marshall Browning Hospital, said she believes that nursing home residents in her part of the state are generally in worse health than elsewhere to start with, because this is the sort of rural community where families “turn themselves inside out” to care for the elderly at home as long as possible.

“By the time families are ready to concede this is more than they can do,” she said, “those residents are really on the downhill slide.”.

Throughout October and into November, Vicki and Jess Short went to Fairview and visited with Walston as best they could, sitting outside a window on a bench and using a baby monitor to talk.

“We just tried to keep her spirits up,” Vicki Short said.

[How government incentives shaped the nursing home business — and left it vulnerable to a pandemic].

The nursing home, locked down since spring, sent out a text message to families (which Short shared with The Post): “The positivity rate continues to climb in our region.

“All it needed was that one little crack to get in there,” Blakemore said.

“I was at Fairview when the breakout happened,” Stout said.

But the virus started spreading so quick.” His staff followed proper procedures when moving residents, he said.

After that first text message from Fairview about a positive test result, Vicki Short said, “we’re thinking, okay, she’s in a room alone, she’s asymptomatic, she’s got a fighting chance here.”.

“I just remember telling her that we were going to take good care of her and keep her comfortable,” Blakemore said.

“Mom was very strong-willed, like people of her generation,” Short said.

[Task force says nursing homes need more aid.

All these weeks, Blakemore, 52, had been managing the nursing staff of about 40 at the hospital.

At the two nursing homes in Du Quoin (the other one is also a WLC property, next door to Fairview and also stricken by the virus), staff knew they’d have to care in place for patients who would normally be sent to the hospital.

Blakemore sent hospital nurses to the nursing homes to assist in setting up intravenous lines.

“The numbers at our nursing homes were very sadly so high.

“These are good-hearted people,” said Blakemore.

Anand Patel, a physician who had experience in ICUs, was a “godsend,” she said, helping the staff work their way through the challenges.

12, when word came of the first positive test at Fairview, the county had 653 cases.

“I guess door-to-door is what you did before Facebook,” Blakemore said.

[Nursing homes say they ‘treat in place.’ Then came covid-19.].

Stout said he doesn’t know what else his staff at Fairview could have done?

He’s angry at the criticism nursing homes have received.

“My staff never got a break,” he said.

He said he is proud of the way his staff responded.

Barbara Stevenson, the administrator of the Perry County Health Department, said she thought the staff at Fairview and other local nursing homes did as well as they could, given the realities they were facing: close quarters in the facilities and a high positivity rate in the city and county?

Residents at high risk because of their underlying health are going to have a high death rate, she said

Vicki and Jess Short both came down with covid-19 in December, just as the outbreak was waning in Perry County, but have slowly recovered

A consultant with the Illinois Department of Public Health, Deborah Burdsall, said the nursing homes that have had the best results in keeping the coronavirus out were those that jumped into high gear at the first sign of infection

“A lot of people think it’s over,” said Dan Eaves, the head of Marshall Browning Hospital

“When it’s time to start bailing water,” Blakemore said, “we start bailing water.”