Two local nursing homes with coronavirus cases missing from Illinois data on outbreaks
At least two metro-east nursing homes where residents or staff have tested positive for COVID-19 are not included in Illinois’ newly-released data on outbreaks at those facilities statewide.
Four Fountains in Belleville has had multiple diagnoses of the respiratory disease and a death, according to the St. Clair County Health Department. At Meridian Village in Glen Carbon, one resident has tested positive and fully recovered, a spokeswoman for the facility said.
Both places were left out of the state’s data at dph.illinois.gov/covid19/long-term-care-facility-outbreaks-covid-19. And at two other nursing homes, the number of COVID-19 patients reported by the state was much higher than what local health departments say it is.
The Illinois Department of Public Health relies on health departments and laboratories to electronically submit information about positive test results to the state, the agency said in an email to the Belleville News-Democrat in response to questions about the discrepancies.
Here are the seven southwestern Illinois nursing homes where the state is reporting an outbreak of COVID-19, which is caused by the coronavirus:
BRIA of Belleville
Carlyle HealthCare Center
Colonnade in O’Fallon
Edwardsville Care Center
Garden Place Independant & Assisted Living in Columbia
Memorial Care Center in Belleville
Stearns Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Granite City
The St. Clair County Health Department has been providing slightly different information than the Illinois Department of Public Health since Sunday, when the state’s data was first published. Local officials started including the nursing homes where the virus has spread in its daily updates on Facebook live streams by the St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency.
The St. Clair County Health Department recorded eight COVID-19 patients and one death at Four Fountains as of Sunday. The number of patients grew to 12 on Monday, according to the health department.
It also recorded 13 patients at Memorial Care Center in Belleville — not 54 like the state’s data shows. One person from Memorial Care Center has died from the disease.
Elsewhere in the metro-east, the state is reporting more COVID-19 patients but fewer deaths at Garden Place Columbia than the Monroe County Health Department is.
Monroe County Health Department Administrator John Wagner has counted 28 patients and six deaths during the outbreak there, while the state says there have been 49 patients and two deaths.
‘Challenges with reporting data in real time’
Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, fielded a reporter’s question about the accuracy of the nursing home data on Monday during state officials’ daily briefing on COVID-19.
“The data’s as good as the data that went in,” Ezike said of the electronic reporting systems used to gather the information from health departments and labs.
The state’s data will be updated weekly, so Ezike said the best place to get up-to-date information is from the nursing homes themselves.
St. Clair County residents can also look to the daily updates from their health department, which on Monday said BRIA of Belleville had 12 COVID-19 patients and one death, for example, while the state was still reporting 11 patients and one death.
The health department said Colonnade in O’Fallon still had two patients Monday, the same as what was reported Sunday by both state and local health officials.
Ezike described the process of reporting data on outbreaks at nursing homes statewide as “a little complex.”
“I’d like to take a minute also to briefly explain the challenges with reporting data in real time for these facility outbreaks,” she said. “... We’re dealing with multiple reporting systems, and a lot of players who have to put the information in, but we at IDPH are doing all that we can to make sure that we share all the information that we can while also being responsible and trying to protect individuals’ privacy rights.
“We know that this is a different time, and some of the requests go further than what we have ever done in the past, so we have to try to navigate that line and not veer too much and not also compromise the privacy of the individuals.”
Why wasn’t the data released sooner?
After Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced that data on nursing home outbreaks would be released over the weekend, a reporter asked him why it wasn’t available to the public earlier.
“We were concerned about, in some areas, you’re stigmatizing people who work at those nursing homes when you publish that that is a nursing home that has an outbreak,” Pritzker said in response during Saturday’s briefing. “You can stigmatize the families, people who have relatives in those nursing homes. And we were concerned about that.”
But the governor added that his administration is “very much in favor” of transparency, citing his daily briefings as an example of that.
“I’ve been here 41 days in a row talking to you about everything to do with COVID-19, and we’re pleased to put all of that data online so that people can look at it now,” he said.
In some cases, local officials were already providing the information.
Wagner, the Monroe County Health Department administrator, has been sending out news releases about the growth of an outbreak at Garden Place Columbia since it started April 8 with three patients.
This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 8:41 AM.
