It had been a harrowing Sunday.
One day after British Columbia’s provincial health officer announced an outbreak of COVID-19 at North Vancouver’s Lynn Valley Care Centre, the children of the long-term care home’s aging residents descended on the facility.
Deanna Harlow recalls a chaotic scene. Her sister told her there were only two people working on her 96-year-old father’s floor. Some aides were in isolation, at home with suspected cases of the novel coronavirus. And replacements were scared to come to the facility.
Residents were isolated in their rooms. Harlow estimates there must be about 45 units on the floor, each housing a patient. Many had complex problems. Catheters. Colostomy bags. Nearly all were wearing adult diapers.
A nurse arrived, meaning that three employees were now tending to a floor that would normally require at least twice that many workers, Harlow said.
The families pitched in to deliver meals and tend to patient needs.
“Several patients, they were bedridden with a wet, wet diaper and calling out incessantly for help,” said Harlow. “It was just — it was mayhem.”
Another woman who was at the facility says a clutch of daughters gathered together at the end of a heart-rending day.
“We were all in there together,” she said. “And one of the women said, ‘We need to let people know about this, because it’s already too late for this care home.'”
A little more than two weeks later, that dire prediction appears to be largely accurate.
The death toll at the Lynn Valley Care Centre remains a moving target after it recorded Canada’s first COVID-19 death on March 8. Ten more residents have since passed. And more than 40 additional patients have tested positive for the virus, along with 21 staff members.
In interviews with CBC News, family members, health-care professionals and community members spoke about the march of a virus that has moved through the facility in much the same way it has through the world, preying on vulnerabilities that seem obvious in hindsight: Reliance on a subcontracted labour force whose members — often migrant workers — work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Gaps in communication. A societal reluctance to talk about the basics of hygiene.
But what has happened at the Lynn Valley Care Centre is also a tale of a community’s response to a tragedy. Of a home to many of the North Shore’s oldest members now transformed into the face of the pandemic in Canada. Of children and adults determined to support seniors isolated by the threat of death.
The facility itself sits a few hundred metres from the intersection of the two main roads that lead into the heart of North Vancouver’s Lynn Valley neighbourhood. It’s a block from the community centre, the mall and the McDonald’s. It’s another block to the local library.
A visitor driving into the community, along Mountain Highway, would pass the bright chalk signs neighbourhood kids have etched onto their wooden fence: “Stay healthy.” And “This too shall pass.”
‘We are very sorry…’
The care centre opened in 1963 and has been operated since 1985 by North Shore Private Hospital, a privately owned corporation.
A woman at the North Vancouver residence of company president Abolhassan Sherkat said she was one of the owners but that any questions should go to administrators. The administration referred all questions to the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which oversees long-term care facilities in the region.
“We are very sorry for the patients and their family and the staff,” the woman said in a brief telephone conversation. “And they’re all working very hard in this time of epidemic disease.”
Spread over two buildings, the Lynn Valley Care Centre is home to 139 government-subsidized beds and 65 private-pay rooms and suites.
According to statistics provided by B.C.’s seniors advocate, Isobel Mackenzie, the average age of the home’s residents is 87 — two years older than the provincial average for long-term care homes.
The numbers provide a snapshot of the needs of the residents who find themselves under threat of COVID-19: 62 per cent have mild to severe dementia; 31 per cent are totally dependent when it comes to the activities of daily living; and nearly 60 per cent are receiving medication for depression.
Mackenzie conducted a survey of residents and frequent visitors at all residential care homes in British Columbia between June 2016 and May 2017, asking them to rate the overall care experience. Lynn Valley Care Centre scored higher than the provincial average on most fronts.
But those numbers also point to a province-wide weakness on a key element of fighting infection in care homes: handwashing. A total of 67 per cent of the most frequent visitors to residential care homes in B.C. said they were never instructed on where to find handwashing products; 80 per cent said care staff never demonstrated to them proper handwashing.