During a recent outbreak at Centennial Homestead in rural central Kansas, the nursing home had to wait five days for COVID-19 test results from a lab hours away.
Dozens of Kansas nursing homes still wait three days to a week for overwhelmed labs to tell them if their residents have COVID-19.
As of mid-November, 30 facilities had less than a week’s worth of N95 masks on hand. Another 100-plus didn’t have enough nurses.
Nine months into a pandemic that has proven most deadly to older people, Kansas nursing homes tell federal regulators they’re still struggling to get the basic tools of defense.
Perhaps most disturbing of all — as the virus rages in cities, suburbs and rural towns — nursing homes simply can’t keep coronavirus out. Two-thirds of them have had confirmed cases among their residents.
Things were bad enough in August and September, when Kansas long-term care facilities were fighting around 40 to 60 active coronavirus outbreaks (meaning two or more cases) at any given time.
October and November brought a vicious surge of the disease. Now, in early December, facilities are dealing with more than 200 ongoing outbreaks.
That escalation brought the virus to the Centennial Homestead in rural Washington County along the border with Nebraska. Centennial had managed to keep the disease out. Until late October.
“Once it’s in your building, you beat yourself up,” said Haely Ordoyne, who co-owns and runs the 30-bed home. “How could this happen? How did it get in? Where did we go wrong?”
And that followed months of isolation and constant fear of a potential outbreak.
“You have PTSD in residents and in their families,” she said. “And I guarantee that my staff has some form of PTSD after this is all said and done.”
Centennial gets five out of five stars on the federal government’s nursing home rating, with two low-level citations on its last annual inspection, compared to a national average of eight.
In July, a federal inspection found Centennial was following best practices to control infections amid the ongoing pandemic.
Sidelined by the virus
During the summer months, about one in five Kansas nursing homes didn’t have enough nurses. Now, a third of them are in that boat.
