How many have died from COVID-19 at an Orange County nursing home? The county won’t say.
The one-story, brick nursing home on Mt. Sinai Road in Orange County had one of the Triangle’s first COVID-19 outbreaks, reported on April 2.
By mid-April, more than 80 residents and employees there had tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said. Four people had died.
Now, at least one family says their loved one, a resident there, also has died from the virus.
But the county and the nursing home company are saying nothing.
“We cannot confirm that information,” Orange County spokesman Todd McGee wrote in an email when The News & Observer asked Monday about the additional death.
Orange County releases less information than neighboring counties on the toll the coronavirus is taking in its nursing homes. The county says it will no longer publicly report nursing-home cases and deaths, as it initially did after the outbreak and as some nearby counties still do, in order to protect the privacy of residents and their families.
Withholding that information keeps people from making proactive, informed decisions, said Lauren Zingraff, executive director of Friends of Residents in Long-Term Care, in an interview with The News & Observer.
“Family members have the right to know in case they want to make a decision regarding bringing a loved one home,” she said, and they’re not always getting timely information.
Other people visiting the nursing home also need this information, Zingraff said, including EMTs, police, delivery drivers, staff members and their families.
“I just think it’s an incredibly critical point for the health and well-being of everyone involved that this information is not buried,” she said.
The outbreak
Orange County reported the first two cases of coronavirus at PruittHealth-Carolina Point in an April 2 news release. A resident had been taken to Duke University Hospital, and a health-care worker was in home quarantine, county officials said.
On that date, the state was reporting a total of only four coronavirus cases in nursing homes in North Carolina, The N&O reported.
Six days later, in an April 8 news conference, Gov. Roy Cooper announced that at least 60 people at an Orange County nursing home — patients and employees — had tested positive for the coronavirus and that two people had died. Cooper did not name the nursing home, but a group of local state legislators named PruittHealth in a news release and the Orange County Health Department confirmed it later that day.
“These are shockingly large numbers,” Cooper said then.
Two days later, on April 10, Orange County announced a third resident at PruittHealth, a person in their 70s, had died. That person died April 8, according to Quintana Stewart, the Orange County health director. The two people whose deaths had been announced previously died April 3 and April 4, she said.
The next day, on April 11, Orange County announced a fourth resident at PruittHealth had died, April 10.
The county’s news releases informed the public about new cases and deaths at PruittHealth, as well as at a second nursing home in the county where additional cases, but no deaths, had been reported.
But the releases ended after the fourth death at PruittHealth, and the information released since has not included nursing-home updates.
PruittHealth’s website currently reports fewer cases than the county has reported. On Wednesday, it listed 57 cases, despite the county previously saying 66 residents and 20 employees had tested positive. The PruittHealth website does not list the number of employees who test positive and gives no information on deaths, though the company stated Wednesday that deaths would be added soon.
Thursday, the website had been updated with a category to track deaths, with two reported at PruittHealth-Carolina Point.
In an email to The N&O, the company, which has 180 locations in the Southeast, stated it reports site-specific information daily to North Carolina, even though the state has not requested such information.
“We cannot speak on behalf of the local health department’s reporting and encourage you to follow up with them directly,” the statement added.
Nursing home deaths don’t always show up in the state’s total for the nursing home’s county, officials have said, because the state reports the deaths as being in a person’s usual county of residence, which sometimes may not be where they are receiving care.
Orange County officials said they only learned of the two PruittHealth deaths when Cooper announced them.
County changes its policy
Days after reporting the fourth death, Orange County said it would no longer provide information about its nursing home outbreaks because doing so could potentially identify someone with the coronavirus.
“When the information is maintained by a local health department, it is protected by HIPAA as well,” the county added in a statement. “The address alone is sufficient to make the information individually identifiable, even without the name. Therefore, the information must be managed in a way that complies with these laws. We will not ever share race, age, sex or zip code.”
But The N&O has not asked for names or other characteristics, instead asking for numbers of cases and deaths to learn whether more nursing-home residents are getting sick and dying.
Wake County, citing legal advice, also does not release the names of nursing homes where residents have died.
Durham County has had three nursing-home outbreaks, and names the facilities and the number of their cases in a news release each day.
Johnston County also issues a daily release with total cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It includes a running count of cases and deaths of Johnston County residents in outbreaks at a local nursing home and at a state prison.
“If a facility is deemed to have an outbreak, we would send out a press release,” spokesperson Lu Hickey wrote in an email. “Once the Springbrook (Rehabilitation and Nursing Center) facility in Johnston County was considered an outbreak, we began sending press releases to share the information on cases and deaths.”
The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services does not release data for individual nursing homes on its website, where it updates total cases, deaths and the number of outbreaks at nursing homes and other congregate care settings daily.
“The reason we do not report individual facilities is because providing specific health information, like small numbers of positive test results for a reportable disease in combination with the geographic location at the facility level, makes the protected health information of the individuals served by that facility identifiable,” communications manager Kelly Haight Connor wrote in an email Thursday.
Orange County reported four more deaths Wednesday. It told The N&O it could not confirm whether any of those who died were nursing-home residents.
A loving grandmother
Loretta Schulz, 80, a resident at PruittHealth-Carolina Point for the past five years, had pulmonary and heart issues, putting her at risk during the pandemic, said Peter Schulz, her son. She died April 14, just one week after testing positive for the virus.
Her death would have been at least the fifth death at PruittHealth, three days after the last death there that Orange County publicly confirmed on April 11.
Amanda Henning, an employee for Lucie Content, which is helping PruittHealth answer questions from the media, would neither confirm nor deny a fifth death.
Loretta Schulz, originally from Warren, Ohio, moved to North Carolina about 15 years ago with her son. She lived in a senior living apartment in Cary for nine years before moving to PruittHealth.
Peter Schulz, who lives in Cary, said he was not allowed to see his mother after PruittHealth went on lockdown after the outbreak there. He spoke to her by cell phone every day, he said, until she tested positive and had to be taken to Duke University Hospital. The hospital was not allowing visitors either, but he said doctors updated him on her condition three times a day.
Peter Schulz said the virus made his mother disoriented.
“She knew her name, knew where she was. That was about it,” he said. “She wasn’t really grasping much.”
Loretta Schulz, a grandmother of four, spent a week in the ICU, where she later died.
His mother was “very simple, but very, very loving,” Peter Schulz said. She loved garage sales, where she would buy gifts for her grandchildren, he said. She was a regular member at Genesis United Methodist Church in Cary.
This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 8:00 AM with the headline "How many have died from COVID-19 at an Orange County nursing home? The county won’t say.."
