Thanks to a commitment to transparency, some important information about COVID-19 in Hancock County was revealed this week.
We’re talking about a report from the Hancock County Health Department that disclosed the number of both infections and deaths at long-term-care facilities. It turns out half of the fatalities suffered here so far have occurred in nursing homes. Ten deaths and 50 positive cases — nearly a fifth of all the positive cases in the county at the time of the report’s release on Monday — occurred at a single facility, Greenfield Healthcare Center, 200 W. Green Meadows Drive.
Until now, this information had been kept secret, in part because Gov. Eric Holcomb and the Indiana State Department of Health had said it would be unfair to nursing homes — the vast majority of which are privately owned — to hold them up to ridicule. State and local health departments also worried about violating federal HIPAA guidelines, which for years have restricted the flow of information about people’s health.
It’s true that the report shines a harsh spotlight on a long-term-care facility in Hancock County. But it also offers important context in understanding how COVID-19 has spread here and how health-care providers have responded.
Most significantly, the report shows how easily our most vulnerable residents can be impacted by this methodical, inexorable contagion.
A spokesman for Greenfield Healthcare’s parent company suggested to the Daily Reporter’s Mitchell Kirk that focusing on numbers dehumanizes the human toll of COVID-19. He has a point. But without reliable accounting, how can we measure that toll at all? How can we respond in a caring way?
Steve Key, general counsel of the Hoosier State Press Association and an authority on public access issues, said it’s also important to focus on the extent to which COVID-19 is moving among staff and employees at these facilities. If there is a cluster of cases among nursing assistants and therapists at a facility, is that not a threat to public health? Does the public not have a right to know about such hot spots?
“Beyond family members, where is the obligation to the community?” Key said in a story published last week in the Daily Journal of Johnson County, one of the Daily Reporter’s sister papers. “(People want to know) do we have a hot spot developing where there are 10 or 15 staff members who are infected and have been circulating among their family and going to the grocery store?”
Data shared daily by the state on its dashboard already is subject to wildly varied interpretations because of inconsistent testing and delayed reporting. It’s a little like building a puzzle without knowing what it’s supposed to look like. That’s why, as Holcomb has said, we need dependable data to make informed decisions about how to proceed.
We don’t know how the sobering numbers we received this week should be interpreted, except to suggest that even a facility on lockdown — as Greenfield Healthcare was from an early date — is still vulnerable. Nearly 40% of Indiana’s fatalities have occurred in long-term-care facilities, suggesting a threat we have not fully addressed.
Dr. Sandra Aspy, the county’s public health officer, and her staff deserve credit for taking the initiative to keep the public informed, as painful as the information was to hear. We probably can expect more unhappy data in coming weeks.
For now, we should keep the families and employees at Greenfield Healthcare and the other long-term-care facilities in our thoughts. And we should be clear-eyed about the continuing threat of COVID-19 and our responsibility to slow its spread.
