More than 80% of all COVID-19 deaths in Sedgwick County are senior-care residents
More than 80% of Sedgwick County’s coronavirus deaths have been residents of senior-care facilities with COVID-19 clusters.
In total, 17 deaths and 128 COVID-19 cases have come from three Wichita-area long-term care facilities — Chisholm Place, Clearwater Nursing and Rehabilitation Center and The Manor Nursing Home at Park West Plaza, according to a news release from Sedgwick County.
Staff and residents at all three facilities have been infected.
At Clearwater, eight residents have died and at least 61 people have been infected by the coronavirus, including 14 nursing home staff.
At Chisholm Place, seven residents have died and at least 46 people have been infected, including 12 staff.
Neither Sedgwick County nor The Manor nursing home have provided more information on that cluster, which is defined as having at least two people who are infected. The updated death total from Sedgwick County shows an additional two deaths and 21 people infected at a nursing home, but doesn’t provide information about the location.
Release of information about clusters has been inconsistent in Sedgwick County.
After identifying the three facilities and giving an initial case count, the Sedgwick County Health Department has kept the public in the dark about the severity of a coronavirus outbreak at all of the facilities except Clearwater.
Chisholm Place, where seven residents have now died of the virus, has five more than the county disclosed before the new higher number surfaced in a news article in Active Age that was also printed by The Eagle on Friday.
When far more deaths and infections were discovered at Chisholm Place than the county had reported, health department Director Adrienne Byrne said the facility hadn’t granted permission to release that information.
But withholding the cluster update appears to be the county’s decision.
Chisholm Place granted the county permission to do so last Monday, said an executive for the company that owns Chisholm Place.
“We responded on May 11, 2020 by email to the health department request regarding release of information,” said Laura Kislowski, vice president for sales and marketing at Anthem, in an email.
“The department was given permission to release information,” she said.
The Sedgwick County Health Department has broad latitude to release information about clusters in the county, but has chosen to only release information it deems vital to protecting the public health.
Sedgwick County commissioners and the Black Alliance have pressed for more detailed information out of the health department for weeks during the height of the pandemic but have been stonewalled by the county’s strict interpretation of privacy laws.
Last month, Sedgwick County denied an open records request by The Eagle seeking the names, locations, case count and deaths associated with clusters at businesses, churches and long-term care facilities.
The county has released limited information about clusters — but only when those organizations agree to do so. In the case of Chisholm Place, the county had permission and still waited four days to give an update.
“Long-term care officials have been transparent with the residents, staff, and families at their facilities. There is no public benefit to the dissemination of information at a more specific level,” county spokesperson Kate Flavin said in an email.
However, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates nursing homes, is taking a different approach.
It is now requiring the care facilities to report the number of infections and deaths related to the coronavirus as well as information about staffing shortages and access to personal protective equipment. The agency plans to post the information — along with the names of the nursing homes — on its website by the end of the month.
It said Friday that it was taking the “swift action and publicly posting this information so all Americans have access to accurate and timely information on COVID-19 in nursing homes.”