Sonoma County health officials reported three more virus-related deaths Monday night, bringing the area COVID-19 death toll during the pandemic that began in March to 50 victims.
Each of the last three victims was over 65 and had underlying medical conditions, while two of their residents were from knowledgeable nursing centers, officials said. And after a weekend of 239 new infections, the province reported 83 additional cases, and the total coronavirus case voted more than 3,750 countywide.
Meanwhile, a elderly care center in Cloverdale became the fifth-largest nursing home in the county to report the death of at least one resident from coronavirus complications, an indication that some areas of nursing homes are battling to contain the infectious disease.
Cloverdale Healthcare Center, a state-of-the-art nursing and rehabilitation facility, also reported on Saturday to public health officials that at least one resident and one staff member tested positive for the highly contagious virus.
It was unclear Monday when the resident of the Cloverdale Center was among the three deaths of county county officials, who reported Friday. One of the three deaths involved a 65-year-old man who lived in an unidentified qualified nursing home and had underlying health problems.
Dr Sundari Mase, the province’s health officer, earlier on Monday called the extra deaths reported Friday “devastating to the community” and reaffirmed how deadly the virus can be to the province’s most vulnerable residents, especially residents of nursing homes.
“It’s the number one priority for the community,” Mase said Monday of working with state infection control experts to try to get an approach on virus transmission in nursing homes. “We can all help protect our seniors by following the health commands.”
Of the 50 residents of the province who have died since Monday from virus complications, 40 have been residents of nursing homes. Of those 40 people, 28 had lived in nursing homes and the others sat in senior performances. With the death toll from the Cloverdale facility, a quarter of the county’s 20 skilled nursing homes now have at least one resident.
Jarrod Morgan, an administrator at Cloverdale Healthcare Center, on Monday did not respond to a reporter’s phone call and an email asking for information about the outbreak of viruses there.
The other four nursing homes that reported at least one death related to COVID-19 are: Sonoma Post Acute and Broadway Villa Post Acute, both in Sonoma; EmPres post acute and rehabilitation in Petaluma; and Petaluma Post-Acute Rehab. Elderly care homes are required to report deaths and new infections to the California Department of Public Health, but exact numbers of deaths and recent cases at each nursing home are protected by the state for patient privacy until the tallies of deaths reach 11 or more infections.
A strike team from the state health department of medical experts that arrived here last week will work on the ground this week with local nursing homes to try to help staff stop the spread of the virus, Mase said Monday in a press release.
“Hopefully, they will end up visiting all the knowledgeable nursing homes, even if they have no cases, and look into their infection control practices for prevention,” she said.
Meanwhile, hospital officials reported 125 new virus infections Saturday – the largest single day of cases reported during the pandemic – and 114 more cases on Sunday – the third-highest daily tally – plus 83 more cases Monday to push the total infection to 3,753 in total countywide. About 1,600 of those cases have been reported since early July because the virus broke back, causing Sonoma County to join the state’s list of counties that have the most difficulty suppressing COVID-19.
Mase said the high case numbers represent local spread of the virus from large outbreaks in workplaces, households, nursing homes and large and small social gatherings of friends and extended family.
In a related case, the health officer also discussed the state’s recently resolved technical glitch with its electronic COVID-19 data collection computer system, a problem that has led to a backlog of nearly 300,000 virus test results in the state.
Mase said it is unclear how much of the overdue results involve Sonoma County residents. She said the backlog tests were processed by commercial labs such as Quest Diagnostics which report results directly to the state. These tests are of a lower priority than the virus tests processed by the province’s public health lab.
Tests processed by the public health lab include those collected by the province’s contract tracers, and the lab’s work identifies most of the positive virus cases in the province, Mase said.
Public health officials said Monday they are ready to work through the backlog of test results and have sent this data to provincial public health departments for full review. Mase confirmed that its public health team is undergoing and indefinitely delayed tests involving local residents and is trying to figure out the reporting date for each assigned.
Early last week, she said the daily total of COVID-19 was probably inaccurate due to the glitch in the state’s electronic reporting. She hopes to fully update the province’s daily infection numbers in the near future.
You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or [email protected]. On Twitter @pressreno.
