An Ontario nursing home besieged by COVID-19 didn’t separate healthy from sick residents or staff until after 16 people had died, and two weeks after the home declared a respiratory outbreak, CBC News has learned.
An Ontario nursing home besieged by COVID-19 didn’t separate healthy from sick residents or staff until after 16 people had died, and two weeks after the home declared a respiratory outbreak, CBC News has learned.
The disease has claimed the lives of more than a third of the residents at Pinecrest, located in Bobcaygeon, Ont., about 150 kilometres northeast of Toronto. A note last month from the home’s administrator said residents had been “isolated into separate areas,” but that didn’t happen until last week.
Efforts to move people to isolated parts of the nursing home were hampered by space constraints, and private rooms only became available after some of the residents with COVID-19 died, a nurse at the home said.
“That’s the reason why we actually have the space now. Because we’ve lost … residents,” said Sarah Gardiner, who has worked at the Pinecrest Nursing Home for 12 years.
“But before, there really was not the space to do that. It would have been an impossibility, I think.”
Changes implemented
The facility houses 65 residents.
CBC News has learned that Pinecrest Nursing Home administrator Mary Carr sent an email on April 3 to staff and to members of residents’ families stating the facility had implemented changes in the previous three days.
Those changes included moving all the residents who were ill to one section of the home to distance them from healthy residents and mitigate any potential spread of the virus.
By April 3, the death toll at the nursing home had risen to 16. As of Tuesday, 27 residents had died and so had a spouse of a resident who volunteered at the home.
Pinecrest officials did not respond to questions from CBC News.
Gardiner said she doesn’t believe implementing stronger infection control measures earlier would have made much difference because of the logistical issues of trying to move healthy residents, their beds and their belongings.
“Because of the layout of our home and the way it’s set up, that would have been really difficult to facilitate that many changes when we had that many people living there, because we were full when this started,” Gardiner said.
The deaths of some residents has opened up some private roo