A cautionary tale from overseas for operators here.

A preliminary report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) into the Life Care Center of Kirkland – where at least 35 resident deaths have been linked to coronavirus – has found the facility failed to rapidly identify and manage sick residents or notify the state Department of Health about an increase in respiratory infections and lacked a sufficient backup plan after the home’s main GP fell ill.

The home reportedly only began testing and isolating residents and alerting officials about a respiratory outbreak over two weeks after staff had noticed it on 10 February.

Life Care Center spokesman Timothy Killian has disputed part of the findings, saying that the GP continued to advise nurses from home after becoming ill early on in the outbreak.

He argued the home had addressed the other issues, and CMS expected the home to “do things that no nursing home would be able to do” in the same situation.

But the home had been cited by the CMS last April for failures to prevent infections – the only facility to receive such a finding in recent years.

Interestingly, it still had a three-star rating out of five stars for health inspections from the CMS, and five stars overall.

What does that say about the US star rating system for aged care homes?

In total, there are now 147 aged care homes across 27 states that have at least one resident with the coronavirus, according to data from US health agencies.

While this is only a fraction of the country’s 15,000-plus aged care homes, the virus’ serious threat to people aged over 65 has already led the Trump administration to suspend visits to all homes except in the cases of residents receiving palliative or end-of-life care.

Like Australia, the CMS has also paused its routine inspections to focus on homes which have previously had issues with infection control (strategy pictured above).