Trumpona Virus Deaths at U.S. Nursing Homes Pass 3,800, With 45 at Virginia Facility
The outbreak at a Virginia nursing home has become the deadliest in the nation at a long-term care facility.
By Danielle Ivory, Mitch Smith and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
New York Times
April 14, 2020, 5:32 p.m. ET
About 80 percent of the residents at the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Richmond, Va., have tested positive for the coronavirus.Credit...Steve Helber/Associated Press
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At least 45 residents of a nursing home in Virginia have died from the coronavirus, the highest known death toll reported at a long-term care facility in the United States, according to an analysis of case data by The New York Times.
An additional 83 residents have tested positive for the virus at the facility, the Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Richmond, Va., its medical director, Dr. Jim Wright, said in an interview on Tuesday. He said the home had about 160 residents, meaning about 80 percent had contracted the virus.
The Times has identified more than 2,500 nursing homes and other long-term care facilities across the United States with coronavirus cases. More than 21,000 residents and staff members at those facilities have contracted the virus, and more than 3,800 have died.
Even those figures are an undercount, but they go beyond state-level numbers that have already been reported. The Times only included cases that have been confirmed by a state or county government agency or by a long-term care facility. Many states, counties and facilities have declined to provide information or provided partial information.
Under the umbrella of “long-term care,” The Times included in its count nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, memory care facilities, retirement and senior communities and long-term rehabilitation facilities.
The Times has tracked hundreds of groupings of coronavirus cases across the country. The 10 deadliest of those clusters have been in nursing homes and long-term care centers, including the Life Care nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., which was linked to at least 43 coronavirus deaths, and the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, Mass., a nursing home for veterans where at least 36 deaths have been linked to the virus. Other long-term care centers in Indiana, Maryland and Massachusetts were each tied to more than 20 coronavirus deaths.
Though the nursing home outbreaks have been far deadlier, there have been larger clusters of cases. More than 500 Navy sailors on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt have been infected in Guam, and more than 500 inmates and guards have been infected at Chicago’s Cook County Jail. Hundreds more cases have been linked to a meatpacking plant in South Dakota and a prison in Michigan.
The virus has been spreading at the facility in Richmond for more than a month, Dr. Wright said. He said he was hopeful that, after infecting most of the facility’s residents and about 20 staff members, it was finally slowing down.
Many residents appear to be recovering, Dr. Wright said, and the rates of deaths and new cases had dropped.
“That’s a hopeful sign,” he said. But he cautioned that a few residents were on palliative care. “We do expect more deaths,” he said.
Karen Yourish, Sarah Almukhtar and Timothy Williams contributed reporting.
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