LEBANON – In the week since two residents were diagnosed with the new coronavirus, three of the four stand-alone buildings at the state’s veterans home here now have people sick with the infection.
But in what is a milestone for the nursing home, the last remaining test results for residents found no new illnesses, officials said Wednesday.
“That’s a positive light in some grim-looking days," said Linn County Commissioner Will Tucker, who has been helping the home get the equipment it needs. “That’s really great news.”
That’s half of the story, though.
Out of about 225 employees at the Edward C. Allworth Veterans’ Home, coronavirus test results are back for just for one -- and the worker tested positive. It could take as long as five days to get back the results for the more than 200 others who submitted samples for testing, a state spokeswoman said.
That’s most of the staff but it’s unclear if there are still some employees who haven’t been tested.
Caregivers were providing samples as of Tuesday, with a white tent set up behind the nursing home at the employee parking lot with the help of the Oregon National Guard. A line of people -- some wearing gowns and masks and others in street clothes -- stood in a line behind the two center buildings.
The nursing home remains on lockdown -- with only essential visitors allowed.
Some residents have been keeping the blinds to their rooms closed to avoid the public gaze.
Others have been talking to families via tablets and, in at least one case, family members visited a resident and talked on the phone while standing in front of the resident’s window, said Tyler Francke, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which owns the home.
None of the home’s residents have died. Of the 151 veterans and veterans’ spouses, 14 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and 137 have tested negative.
The total of 15 cases -- including the employee -- linked to the home are the most tied to a single place in Oregon – the nursing home is the epicenter of the state’s outbreak.
"Our efforts remain laser focused on following established infectious disease prevention protocols and public health guidelines to keep our residents and staff safe and prevent the spread of this virus within our community,” Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs Director Kelly Fitzpatrick said in a statement.
The state department so far has released no information about the conditions of the people with coronavirus.
Seven of the residents with coronavirus are over 90. Three of them are in their 80s, three are in their 70s and one is in the 60s. Most of the nursing home’s residents are older than 70. About a third are older than 90.
One of the patients is a woman, a veteran’s spouse.
So far, all of the residents with coronavirus remain at the veterans home.
Because the home is split into separate residential buildings – what the nursing home calls the Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta neighborhoods – the hope was that the infections would be contained to just one of them, but that hasn’t played out.
Tucker said the veterans home had been trying to isolate some of the sick people in the Bravo neighborhood – where the men with the first two cases live.
The Bravo building is connected to the complex’s main lobby and community center, where the nursing home hosted a plastic modelers club event on March 7 – a week after Oregon’s first coronavirus case and five days before the facility’s first cases.
The Bravo building contains two separate homes that share a common wall and house a maximum of 14 residents each. The other neighborhood buildings have three homes with the same capacity.
The nursing home also apparently is still scrambling to get protective gear for the workers, Tucker said, though the VA Department said it has the gear it needs.
Over the weekend, the home got 1,000 gowns from the state to avoid running out. On Tuesday, veterans home officials asked Tucker for an urgent delivery of 1,000 masks, he said.
The county commissioner said he pulled a few boxes of cloth masks with elastic bands and N95 masks – about a few hundred total – from the county’s emergency supplies stored at the Sheriff’s Office compound and delivered them to the nursing home himself.
On Wednesday, he was working with the Oregon Health Authority to get the home more masks. “That’s an ongoing excitement for me,” Tucker said.
He also said some of the veterans home staff have access to a three-bedroom apartment in Lebanon that can hold up to six people for those who don’t want to go home and infect their families and friends. The VA Department said the apartment as “a place for downtime for the staff.”
Employees work in 12-hour shifts and are providing staffing at the levels required by the state, the department spokesman said. “At this time, we are meeting those ratios and have all of the staffing resources necessary to ensure the care needs of our residents are being met,” Francke said.
He also pointed to an outpouring of community support.
He said an employee who manages activities at the home came in on a day off and helped a resident talk via Skype with family for a birthday. Many donations have come in, Girls Scouts have donated cookies to the workers and a health care staffing company provided 50 pizzas.
A flower company delivered more than enough flowers for each resident to get one because “one of our Bravo vets asked what the flowers looked like outside,” Francke said.
Each day brings new challenges to the nursing home and the small city of 17,000.
Faith Rieke was out for a walk with her husband, heading down the sidewalk across the street from the veterans home.
She was born and raised in Lebanon, and when the nursing home went up in 2014, she was thrilled. It often bustles with community activities, Rieke said.
On Halloween a year ago, Rieke took four of her grandchildren there for trick-or-treating. The residents sat out in the halls and handed out candy, she said, and had games, like bean bag toss, for the kids to play.
Even when no events are scheduled, Rieke said, people can stop by in the afternoon and buy a milkshake at the soda fountain at the home.
Now she waits anxiously to find out what’s next.
“We hear the staff is just working around the clock,” Rieke said.
-- Fedor Zarkhin
desk: 503-294-7674|cell: 971-373-2905|@fedorzarkhin
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