“Crowding is like fuel for the pandemic,” said Dr. Mark Abdelmalek, an ABC News medical contributor. “People are fully mixing and paths intersecting frequently.”
Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, recently compared meat-packing plants to “stationary cruise ships.” “We started seeing reports more recently – about three to four weeks ago,” said Fran Phillips, Maryland’s deputy health secretary. “These are folks that work very close together. So it’s a large congregation of people. Many of whom drive together in carpools. This is a rural part of the state. These are low income people in crowded housing. It’s a compound of factors.
As the virus began to spread, nursing homes began instituting a series of measures to fortify the facilities. By the end of March, most homes had instituted bans on outside visitors. Communal activities were slowed or halted, group dining areas were shuttered. A number had devised strategies to immediately isolate residents who showed early symptoms of infection, such as a cough or fever.
State totals analyzed by ABC News have started to show the totality of the outbreak’s deadly imprint on nursing facilities. Available data from the 35 reporting states and D.C. shows there have been at least 26,013 nursing home deaths. That is 31% of the national death toll. And when adjusted to only include death counts of those states reporting, nursing home deaths make up 40% of the nation’s total number of fatalities.
Within three weeks, six more inmates at Oakdale had died, and at least 100 inmates and staff were infected. The numbers are striking. Across the federal system, 3,082 federal inmates and 248 staff have tested positive, with 45 deaths. Health department totals for the 47 states that track the numbers indicate at least 16,500 inmates in state prisons have tested positive and between federal and state prisons, over 300 have died. Data compiled by ABC News showed more than 6,000 corrections professionals at state and federal facilities have also tested positive for COVID-19.
“These environments require frequent and regular testing in a coordinated approach, especially to detect asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus,” said Abdelmalek, the ABC News medical contributor. “Without testing, the asymptomatic carriers in these populations can cause widespread and quickly spreading outbreaks.”