(The Center Square) – With more than half of the state’s total COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, state public health officials said they are making progress to address the issues.
U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Evanston, criticized U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration’s handling of reporting nursing home data during an Energy and Commerce Committee Hearing on Tuesday.
“There is a crisis in our nursing homes that persists, and that we insist that the government do more to help,” Schakowsky said.
Others at the hearing in Washington D.C. criticized governors for requiring patients to return to nursing homes.
“Even with CDC guidance in hand, some governors chose to ignore that guidance and they actually forced sick nursing home patients back to nursing homes committing the deadliest of the pandemic,” said U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon.
Last week, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said the state’s policy was to have COVID-19 patients transferred from hospitals back to nursing homes after they recovered. Those people were still isolated when they returned to the long-term care facility.
“Each nursing home has a slightly different measure depending on multiple floors, or wings on one floor,” Pritzker said. “You don’t remain COVID-positive after you’ve recovered for very long at all in fact, and so they’re trying to take a measure of what the science says and act upon that at the nursing home.”
U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, said that was protocol on all levels at the beginning of the pandemic.
“As a matter of fact, that’s how an infected person got back to one of the senior facilities in my home town of Taylorville early on,” Davis said Friday. “But we addressed it in Taylorville, quarantined that facility.”
He said 14 days later, that facility had no residents with COVID-19.
“I don’t know what the governor has done, but I do know that because of what we’ve seen here and elsewhere I don’t think any hospital is sending patients back to senior facilities that are positive tests and if they are, stop,” Davis said.
Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said there are 25 facilities where such patients are transferred and the state is making progress.
“We have had a decrease in the number of weekly totals of deaths from the nursing homes, week after week for the last six weeks, so we are doing better,” Ezike said. “We are having fewer deaths.”
“I think we’re moving in the right direction and we think the stats show that with a decreasing number of fatalities in nursing homes across the state,” she said.
The latest data from IDPH on COVID-19 and long-term care facilities showed there were a total of 21,390 positive cases and 3,649 deaths. That’s more than half of the 6,707 total deaths statewide attributed to COVID-19, as of Tuesday evening.
