COVID-19 hotspots at 2 assisted living homes for seniors in Sacramento. At least 65 infected

At least 65 residents and employees from two Sacramento County assisted-living facilities owned by the same company have tested positive for COVID-19, according to new state data released late Monday.

Sunrise Assisted Living-Sacramento reported at least 25 residents and 23 employees infected with the new coronavirus. Similarly, Sunrise Assisted Living-Fair Oaks reported 16 infected residents and at least one employee with the disease.

The two facilities represent one of the largest clusters of COVID-19 cases in California’s long-term care facilities. There are more than 7,000 assisted living facilities in the state, where residents generally live in their own rooms or apartments, share meals in dining rooms, and have access to 24-hour assistance from staff.

The Virginia-based company, Sunrise Senior Living, operates 329 senior-living communities, including several in California. State inspection reports do not show any serious violations at the two facilities in recent years. Few additional details were available about the cases; officials did not return calls for comment Tuesday.

“The health and safety of our residents and team members remain our top priorities and we are working closely with the Sacramento Department of Health to fight COVID-19 within our community,” Carla Sanchez, regional vice president for Sunrise Senior Living, said in a statement to earlier this month.

The Sacramento cases are among at least 856 residents and employees at California’s vast array of assisted-living facilities who have tested positive for COVID-19. The number of cases is likely much higher, however, because the information provided by the California Department of Social Services only includes facilities that house more than six people and have reported clusters of more than 10 confirmed cases.

That means the state’s smaller group homes, as well as assisted-living facilities with 10 or fewer confirmed cases among residents and employees, are excluded from the published count altogether. The department in its report cited privacy concerns for the limited amount of information.

At least 91 people from California’s assisted-living facilities have died of complications related to COVID-19, according to updated data published Tuesday afternoon.

Half of the 21 large facilities with reported clusters are in Los Angeles County, where 255 employees and residents have tested positive. San Diego County reported 67 people with positive tests affiliated with three separate assisted-living facilities experiencing an outbreak with more than 10 cases.

Information will be added in later updates, a spokesman said.

It also fails to reflect a known cluster of cases that happened in a Sacramento County assisted-living facility last month that included the county’s first death attributed to COVID-19, a woman in her 90s who lived at Carlton Senior Living in Elk Grove. At least six residents there also contracted the disease, officials said previously.

Another Carlton Senior Living facility in Contra Costa County is also omitted from the DSS report. At least 20 residents and 23 employees have been infected, a Contra Costa County spokesperson said in an email last week when asked about infections in long-term care facilities. It was not immediately clear why that facility was not on the list.

The California Department of Public Health, which is separate from DSS and oversees nursing homes, released the names of facilities with any confirmed COVID-19 cases late Friday. Though also incomplete, the data indicated 1,740 residents and 1,290 employees at 258 facilities across 21 counties had been infected with the coronavirus.

In a press briefing last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom said COVID-19 ”certainly no party. It knows no region. This is impacting all of us across the state.”

Ongoing data collection efforts

Both data releases came after The Bee reported Friday morning that one-third of the California counties had at least one case of COVID-19 in a long-term care facility, an umbrella term for nursing homes and other assisted-living homes.

The Bee contacted each of the 58 county health departments to ask for basic details about the number of cases in such facilities and how many people in the county who died had connections to them. Responses from 50 counties provided the most complete picture of how the coronavirus pandemic spread through long-term care facilities in California.

The responses also revealed a lack of widespread and systematic testing for the disease inside facilities, inconsistent case reporting and, in some cases, an outright refusal to share basic information at all.

Where one California county publishes the number of facilities with infections, another publishes the facility names. And where one lacks details about testing inside nursing homes, another outright denies access to aggregated information about confirmed cases.

Experts said those types of inconsistencies have stymied a broader understanding of the spread of the new coronavirus inside facilities that care for California’s most vulnerable residents.

“If we are going to make the case that we need more nursing home resources, we need to know the extent of the problem,” said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. “How do we learn best practices from a public health perspective if we don’t even know which facilities have cases?”

This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 1:35 PM.