Name: COVID outbreak at Dover veterans home appears over, but not until after it took 10 lives
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COVID outbreak at Dover veterans home appears over, but not until after it took 10 lives

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Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.Please subscribe to keep reading. You can cancel at any time.Loading&amp;hellp;{{title}}{{description}}{{banner}}(renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax){{tagline}}{{special_title}}{{html}}You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.© 2022 Lee EnterprisesShare ThisCOVID outbreak at Dover veterans home appears over, but not until after it took 10 livesShare thisDOVER — Ten residents of the died after catching COVID-19 in August, and only five of them were on hospice care prior to testing positive.Like most outbreaks inside facilities where people live long-term, such as jails and nursing homes, the outbreak at the Town of Dover facility — which ended up infecting 28 residents and 28 staff members — likely started with a staff member bringing the coronavirus in from the outside, since visitors haven’t been allowed to enter the building since March.That’s why even those elderly and immunocompromised people who live socially distanced in long-term care facilities remain at high risk of dying from COVID-19 as the pandemic seemingly runs rampant in public.“Each day that COVID-19 activity remains in this state is a day that puts our residents and employees at our Wisconsin Veterans Homes at risk for contracting this terrible virus,” Carla Vigue, communications director for the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs, said in an email. “What happens outside our doors affects us. We don’t operate in a bubble. Staff need to go out in the community once they leave work. They need to get gas and groceries. They need to pick their kids up from school and child care. They need to go to their own medical appointments.”The outbreak in the local Veterans Home now appears to be over, with no staff or residents still testing positive. But the virus claimed 10 lives before it left. Nine of the 10 who died were military veterans; the 10th was a veteran’s spouse. No staff members died from the virus, according to the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs.In early September, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil — a Republican from Janesville who within the past week — requested U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie have the outbreak at the Dover facility investigated.“We need to learn from these outbreaks so that we can prevent further cases. Our veterans deserve the highest quality care and frontline staff at the facility need support,” Steil said in a Monday statement.The Veterans Home at Union Grove, and one of 158 such facilities nationwide, had taken pride in not allowing COVID-19 to penetrate its walls before August. From March through July, “many nursing homes in the region, state and nation were not able to prevent the virus from entering their facilities as we did,” Vigue said in an email. “Our staff are to be commended.”When the virus did get in, however, it spread like a proverbial wildfire, infecting 56 people.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “given their congregate nature and resident population served — e.g., older adults, often with underlying chronic medical conditions — nursing home populations are at high risk of being affected by respiratory pathogens like COVID-19 and other pathogens.”One of the factors at play at the local veterans home and at other similar facilities is patients who have dementia and other memory-affecting diseases.According to a 4-page that resulted from Steil’s request for an investigation, “residents on the Memory Care unit had difficulty following the recommendations (such as mask wearing and remaining isolated) and were regularly redirected due to poor cognition and dementia.”At the Dover facility, the outbreak was first detected in the Memory Care unit, with one staff member stationed there testing positive on Aug. 2 followed by two veterans in Memory Care testing positive the next day. By Aug. 7, all 153 residents living in the facility at that time had been tested, with residents of Memory Care also having been tested also on Aug. 4, according to the VA.Outbreaks within a facility also make it tougher for residents, even those who don’t catch COVID, to receive adequate care since staff often contract the coronavirus and thus aren’t able to work. Caring for nursing home residents isn’t really something that can be done while working from home.After the outbreak was detected in the Dover facility, it accepted help from the federal Department of Veterans Affairs.The VA had been offering help since May, but that help had been rejected by the DVA since “we did not require staffing assistance from the federal VA while we were successfully keeping the virus at bay,” Vigue said. That changed once cases started being reported in August.Thirteen federal employees from VA medical centers around the state were sent to Dover “to supplement staff,” working there from Aug. 9 through Sept. 10, at which time the facility’s typical staff were back above water. A federal infectious disease physician also worked on site for 10 days by “providing further consultation to contain the outbreak,” according to the investigation.By early September, no more patients were still testing positive.Nationwide, the federal VA reports that it has supported 86 veterans homes in 38 states by “deploying 752 VA staff to assist with clinical care, testing, training, infection, control consultation, quarantine/isolation and space management.”Steil took issue with the Wisconsin DVA not accepting help from the federal VA sooner. On Monday, he sent a to DVA Secretary Mary Kolar, asking her why the federal “assistance was initially declined.”While nursing homes and other long-term care facilities led the early spikes in deaths from COVID-19 months ago, they continue to be hotspots for the spread of COVID-19 and deaths caused by it.From Oct. 12 through Nov. 8, 294 of Wisconsin’s 838 coronavirus-related deaths were in nursing homes. In the previous month, only 28 deaths linked to COVID-19 were reported in nursing homes, .Residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities comprise a small percentage of overall coronavirus cases in Wisconsin, but represent at least 27% of fatalities, according to the state Department of Health Services. That percentage may be slightly higher or lower because health officials don’t know the housing status of more than 1,300 people who have died.Across Wisconsin, 3,115 coronavirus-related deaths had been reported in total as of Tuesday.As a state, Wisconsin ranks sixth in the country for new cases per capita, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. There were 1,605 new cases per 100,000 people in Wisconsin over the past two weeks.Reporting from the Associated Press contributed to this story.Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.Residents of a nursing home of Ammerschwihr, France, are tested with PCR tests for COVID-19 on Nov. 9. The situation in hospitals and nursing homes is grim, with emergency wards in Europe and the U.S. approaching saturation and some sick patients being evacuated from struggling hospitals to others that still had space.Steil{{title}}{{summary}}You don't have any notifications.Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.Topics

Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.Please subscribe to keep reading. You can cancel at any time.Loading&amp;hellp;{{title}}{{description}}{{banner}}(renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax){{tagline}}{{special_title}}{{html}}You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.© 2022 Lee EnterprisesShare ThisCOVID outbreak at Dover veterans home appears over, but not until after it took 10 livesShare thisDOVER — Ten residents of the died...

COVID outbreak at Dover veterans home appears over, but not until after it took 10 lives

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