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BRATTLEBORO — All residents and staff at the 60-bed Thompson House rehabilitation and nursing center have tested negative for Covid-19 after an employee who hadn’t worked in two weeks tested positive for the virus.
“While we are encouraged and relieved that there are no active cases among our residents, all of us here at Thompson House are acutely aware that there are 36 other nursing centers in Vermont,” administrator Dane Rank said Friday. “Every resident and every staff member at every nursing center and assisted living residence in the state should be tested.”
The employee at the nursing home near Brattleboro Memorial Hospital first reported a household member had a high temperature weeks ago. A test by the facility’s private workers’ compensation provider found the household member had Covid-19, which led managers to ask the staffer — who didn’t have symptoms — to self-quarantine for two weeks.
The staffer was due to resume work Monday, but a test prior to their return confirmed that they had Covid-19. Thompson House had tried to obtain a state test for the employee before they came back to work, but was unable to, and instead turned again to its workers’ compensation provider.
Only after learning the employee’s diagnosis did a team from the Vermont Department of Health travel to Brattleboro on Wednesday to test all 53 residents and 71 workers. The nursing home received and released the results Friday morning.
“At least we know our infection prevention practices are working,” Rank said. “We cannot let our guard down — our residents, their families and our staff depend on us.”
Rank has written Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine seeking permission for all long-term care providers to test patients and workers rather than follow the current policy of referring sick staffers home to their physician.
“This will speed up the discovery of infection by days or weeks,” Rank wrote Levine, “and allow us to take measures and allocate resources to have the greatest effect to halt the scores of older patients who will be dying in Vermont.”
Rank has reiterated that point in a public commentary.
“The lack of universal access to testing for employees and residents of long-term care facilities means that we are flying blind,” he wrote, urging the public to call on officials to make tests more immediately available for nursing and assisted living facilities.
Asked earlier this week about state procedures, Levine said his department was working toward “more aggressive testing” through a pilot project with the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although he wouldn’t elaborate.
“More to come on that in the future,” Levine said at a Wednesday press conference with Scott.
Nursing homes have proved the state and nation’s most problematic Covid-19 hotspots. Of the 827 cases that have been confirmed, as of Friday, in Vermont since the beginning of the outbreak, nearly 150 have been long-term care patients or providers. Of the state’s more than 40 deaths, almost half have been from such facilities.
Thompson House will continue with its prevention measures — starting with the staffer reporting the household member’s symptoms. The positive employee, for their part, will self-quarantine for another two weeks and won’t be allowed to return to work until receiving two negative tests.
