Hammonton center has outsized COVID-19 infections; state can't say why

It was Saturday, April 18, and while New Jersey was seeing a wave of rising COVID-19 cases, the situation seemed stable at the 240-bed nursing facility, where just two cases and no fatalities had been reported at the time.

But Acevedo was worried. She called the facility several times and left messages, but it wasn’t until two days later, on April 20, that she was able to speak to her mom, Eleanor Perez. Perez, 74, told her daughter she had been running a fever, feeling off and not eating. And she said patients were no longer allowed to leave their rooms.

Acevedo called the nursing home, trying to get answers. When she finally reached a nurse April 23 and asked why Perez had not been tested for the new coronavirus, despite showing signs of an upper respiratory infection, Acevedo said she was told they were “short-staffed.” The nurse agreed to check on Perez.

By that night, Perez was transferred to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center with a fever. There, she tested positive for COVID-19 and remains on a ventilator.

The virus has spread rapidly through the Hammonton Center, with 149 positive cases and 12 deaths, according to the state Department of Health’s figures Friday.

The Hammonton Center has South Jersey’s highest level of infection among tested long-term care facilities by far, comparable to some of Bergen and Hudson counties’ most infected institutions, state data show.

A spokesperson for Centers Health Care of the Bronx, New York, which owns the Hammonton Center, attributed the spike in cases to state testing but did not answer questions about why its numbers were so much higher than those of other long-term care facilities in South Jersey.

“The staff have been in full PPE since early March per the guidelines of the New Jersey Department of Health and the CDC, plus screening of staff have been taking place before they enter the facility,” said Vice President of Communications Jeffrey Jacomowitz.

He said staff temperatures are taken and they are asked how they feel and observed.

“If any of that becomes apparent (fever, sniffles, cough), the staffer is turned away and told to go home and quarantine,” Jacomowitz said. “The screening at the door is designed to not bring in COVID-19 from the outside. ”

Nursing homes in general have been at the center of COVID-19 deaths, making up 40% of the deaths statewide.

“I can’t speak to a particular home. I can look it up,” Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli said Friday during Gov. Phil Murphy’s daily media briefing, when asked what caused the infection rate to explode at the Hammonton site.

Later, a spokesperson for the Health Department could not answer questions about why the infection rate climbed so high there.

Persichilli said retesting will be done at the 16 long-term care facilities where staff and residents were recently tested by Cooper University Health System, including the Hammonton Center.

“We are following up the process — it is test and then retest all the negatives so we know exactly the status of the residents and the staff,” Persichilli said. “There is an indication that for long-term care over the long haul there will be constant testing and retesting.”

The size of the outbreak in Hammonton became apparent after Cooper sent workers April 24 to test all of the residents and staff. The results came in this past week, revealing the much higher levels of infection.

“Part of the problem with the infection for COVID is — it just has to do with the nature of nursing homes,” said Patrice Mareschal, an associate professor of public policy at Rutgers University Camden. “You have a lot of people living together in a small area … older adults with underlying chronic medical conditions. They are already more susceptible to it.”

There is also the need for close contact between residents and staff, particularly for nursing assistants who on average care for 12 patients per shift, she said.

“They have to help with activities of daily living — assisting with getting dressed, bathing, toileting and feeding,” Mareschal said. “There’s already a high rate of occupational injury (often from lifting patients), and the average hourly wage is about $13.38 an hour. That’s a little over $22,000 a year.”

In addition, some residents have disabilities like Alzheimer’s disease that make it impossible to understand what they need to do in terms of social distancing and hygiene, Mareschal said.

“The residents (and staff) for all of those reasons are at increased risk (of infection),” she said.

A nurse at the Hammonton Center, who spoke to The Press previously and has asked not to be named, said Thursday things have improved there since the state stepped in to help late last month.

“The state was in, and you could tell they were just scrambling,” she said. “Three days, they just turned that place upside down getting all the COVID in one unit, getting everyone separated, we’ve gotten boxes and cases of PPE in. I think everyone was really happy with it. It was a lot of work. We kept telling them, ‘You know you should have done this weeks ago.’”

An employee at another nursing home in Egg Harbor Township said that even with the proper equipment, there is a lack of knowledge among many working in long-term care facilities on the proper use of PPE.

“We’re not trained to be in a hospital,” said the employee of Egg Harbor Care Center. “These isolation wings at these facilities are overwhelming.”