At least 45 dead at Virginia nursing home, more expected

Forty-five residents of a Virginia nursing home near Richmond have died from COVID-19 in one of the worst clusters of the new coronavirus in the United States, and officials expect more deaths to come.

Colette Luke has more.

Forty-five residents of a Virginia nursing home near Richmond have died from COVID-19, making it one of the worst clusters in the United States.

Of the 163 residents of Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Henrico County, at least 127 elderly people have tested positive in recent weeks with officials expecting more deaths to come.

And in the state of Virginia, of the 102 known coronavirus outbreaks, over half are in long-term care facilities like Canterbury.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. JAMES LEE WRIGHT, THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR AT CANTERBURY REHABILITATION AND HEALTHCARE CENTER, SAYING: “It's been tough…” Dr. James Wright is the medical director at Canterbury.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. JAMES LEE WRIGHT, THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR AT CANTERBURY REHABILITATION AND HEALTHCARE CENTER, SAYING: “Since we were the first in the community to go through it, we did not have a lot of other people to rely on.

We felt alone.” Wright said at least 35 members of Canterbury’s staff have tested positive.

He said the virus has exacerbated existing personal protective equipment and staffing shortages, with some staffers refusing to come to work for fear of getting ill.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. JAMES LEE WRIGHT, THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR AT CANTERBURY REHABILITATION AND HEALTHCARE CENTER, SAYING: "We were as prepared as we possibly could be, being a publicly funded nursing home in the United States.

We have chronic staffing shortages, chronic shortages of of personal protective equipment./And we realized we were not only in need of equipment such as masks, the N95 masks, but that we could no longer get them from our supplier.

So at that point our supplier, along with many other nursing home suppliers, were diverting materials to hospitals.

And so we were short on gowns and masks at the beginning of the crisis." Wright said he hoped the situation at Canterbury would spur a (quote) "national come to Jesus moment," where the public would demand more tax dollars be spent on care for the elderly.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. JAMES LEE WRIGHT, THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR AT CANTERBURY REHABILITATION AND HEALTHCARE CENTER, SAYING: "A publicly funded nursing home is a, is a coronavirus' dream because, as opposed to a privately funded nursing home, we have patients that generally have poorer health to begin with/I think if we can do anything, it is to shed the spotlight on the sad state of our publicly funded nursing homes and stop blaming nursing homes for the care and start blaming ourselves./ Are we honoring our elders in the way we underfund nursing homes?

And the answer, of course, is no, it is not." The number of deaths at Canterbury has surpassed the recent death toll at Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, the initial epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.