More COVID-19 tests at Brighton Gardens in Prairie Village as cases, deaths increase
Johnson County health officials provided a Prairie Village nursing facility with more than 200 COVID-19 testing kits Thursday after confirmed cases and deaths there increased in recent days.
Brighton Gardens in Prairie Village now has 32 positive cases and six deaths, according to the Johnson County Department of Health and Environment. The facility had 21 cases and three deaths when officials released information a week ago.
By giving the facility 230 kits, “this will allow us to test every resident of the facility and the staff,” Dr. Sanmi Areola, public health director, told county commissioners during their meeting Thursday. “The idea for us is we will separate the positive cases into a section away from the negatives as a way to contain the virus.
“We plan to repeat this after a week to see how things are going.”
Brighton Gardens has the highest number of cases of Johnson County facilities with a COVID-19 outbreak. Another facility, Forest Creek Memory Care, has 24 cases and seven deaths.
Nursing facilities in Wyandotte and Johnson counties have been hit hard since the outbreak began. Riverbend, a rehabilitation and nursing home in Kansas City, Kansas, is linked to 132 cases — 105 residents and 27 staff — as of Thursday. So far, 32 residents of Riverbend have died.
In Johnson County, there have been 128 cases and 29 deaths in at least 15 facilities.
For weeks Areola refused to name the long-term care facilities battling the virus, saying it was an issue of privacy. But after The Star continued to ask and submitted an open records request last week, and members of the public also asked for the information, the department released its report last Friday evening.
One commissioner, Mike Brown, wrote on Facebook after The Star’s report that in multiple public meetings he has asked for the number of confirmed cases and deaths in long-term care facilities.
“I also asked for the names of the facilities and was flat told the information was private and could not be shared for ‘privacy reasons’ on multiple occasions,” Brown wrote on Facebook. “... Transparency is the foundation for building and maintaining the confidence of the people with, to and from their government.
“This was far less than transparent (intentional or not), took far too long to get to the public and causes me — and more importantly the public — to doubt the availability and reliability of important data. That is not transparency... and that is unacceptable.”
Commissioner Becky Fast said during Thursday’s virtual meeting that she had heard from families with people in nursing homes who couldn’t get information from the facilities.
And Brown also commented that he had heard concerns. He directed a question to Areola:
“In a pandemic, where is the line between a citizen’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know what’s happening around them?”
The health director said he’s concerned with what works for health. What’s important to him is to provide enough information to the public to protect themselves.
“So the question is, what’s going on in your facility, around where you are, does that increase or reduce your risk?” Areola said. “And I’ll answer that does not increase your risk. And knowing where the positives are does not impact what you are supposed to do. “
In his public health career, Areola said he’s handled many outbreaks. But this is the first time he’s released this type of information.
“We have adjusted to the demand of the public to provide this information,” he said.
Now that it has been provided, Areola told commissioners that the department will continue to update it on the website and will include those numbers on its COVID-19 dashboard.
But he also told commissioners that it’s not the job of a public health department to identify facilities where there’s an outbreak. His role, he told them, is to balance the privacy of residents with releasing information.
“Releasing individual information about facilities is very, very, very unusual,” Areola said. “You will not see a lot of health directors or a lot of health departments doing that. ... It is very unusual.”
But across the country, information about nursing homes and COVID-19 cases is being reported in some places, sometimes after public and media pressure.
Getting requests from the media and the public is expected, Areola said.
“But my role is to provide aggregate information. There are so many consequences to release information out there.”
As for Brighton Gardens, a representative with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention visited the facility last weekend.
“Her conclusion was things were being done properly,” Areola said. “We continue to look at how we can assist this facility. “
