Assisted living outbreak comes with heart-rending tale




CASUALTY—Robin Chambers as a young man. The 84-year-old died last month after contracting COVID at a local assisted-living facility, his stepson says.

CASUALTY—Robin Chambers as a young man. The 84-year-old died last month after contracting COVID at a local assisted-living facility, his stepson says.

Before Patricia Chambers died in 2016, she told her only son that she was worried about what would happen to her husband, Robin, who had dementia. So Pat’s son made a promise to his dying mother.

“I said, ‘Mom, don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.’”

Robin Chambers lived in Palo Alto, and Pat’s son, who asked that The Acorn protect his privacy, would make two to three trips a month from his home in Thousand Oaks to check in on his stepfather, buy him groceries and make sure he was taken care of. He had a delivery service bringing him necessities for a time, but due to his dementia, Chambers had issues with the drivers and was ultimately barred from using the service.

For four years, Pat’s son, a married father of two, made the biweekly pilgrimage to the Bay Area. As Chamber’s condition worsened, his stepson considered moving him into a brand-new assisted-living facility closer to home—Sage Mountain Senior Living in Newbury Park. But when the pandemic hit, Pat’s son thought his stepfather was safer isolated in his Palo Alto home.

That opinion changed this fall after he found Chambers shivering and confused in a dark, cold house with the door open.

So in October, when COVID rates were dropping, Pat’s son moved his stepdad into the memory care unit at Sage Mountain.

That’s where Chambers, 84, caught the coronavirus in late December or early January and died 10 days after his diagnosis.

He is one of over 100 deaths in the county linked to nursing homes since the pandemic began, a function of the virus’ elevated threat to people over 70, who have accounted for 60% of Ventura County’s COVID death toll.

Because Chambers was isolated from the other residents, Pat’s son said, his stepfather was likely infected by a staff member.

“If I would have left Robin in Palo Alto he would still be alive today,” his stepson said. “I’ve been trying to comfort myself that his quality of life was better at Sage. I resisted putting him in the home because I thought I could be giving him a death sentence. Turns out that’s what I did.”

Chambers, whose infection was discovered only after he was admitted to Los Robles Regional Medical Center for an unrelated fall, was the first identified case of COVID-19 in what would become an outbreak of dozens of cases among residents and staff.

Multiple attempts to reach Sage Mountain representatives via phone and email over the course of three weeks to comment for this story have been unsuccessful.

Communication concerns

To date, Sage Mountain has reported 27 COVID infections among staff and 38 among residents, according to information from the California Department of Social Services, fairly small figures when compared to other local assisted-living facilities. There have been fewer than 11 deaths there.

But family members of residents said Sage Mountain staff obscured the extent of the outbreak by sending vague communications.

A Jan. 12 email provided to The Acorn reported “some” residents were showing symptoms. A Jan. 13 email notifying families of Chambers’ diagnosis said that one resident “currently out of the community” had tested positive. His stepson said the communication contained such sparse information he considered it a “lie of omission.”

A Jan. 17 email said the facility was creating a containment unit.

Thousand Oaks resident Nancy Healey, whose close friend is on hospice care at Sage, said she knew there were a few cases but was unaware of the full extent of the COVID outbreak until she received an email from a family member of another resident on Jan. 23.

The email, which was sent to everyone on the facility’s family email list, said the sender was notifying families “amid the continued lack of communication from Sage management.” The person reported there were 46 active COVID cases linked to Sage at the time.

“Without that letter, I wouldn’t have known a thing,” Healey said.

Complaints filed

At a community Zoom meeting Jan. 25, Healey said, she and over 70 other relatives of residents learned details of the outbreak, which had spread from memory care to the assisted-living unit. Healey said family members were upset that Sage Mountain let residents visit home for the holidays, continued to advertise for new residents and offered tours of the facility over the winter.

To create a COVID unit to contain the outbreak, residents were moved to different rooms so the second floor could be dedicated to COVID patients. Healey said her bedridden friend was moved to a room without television for 11 days. When Healey asked the facility to fix the situation, they said her friend needed to call Spectrum to sort out the billing issues related to the room move.

During the family Zoom meeting, a daughter of a resident reported that her deaf mother was moved.

On the mend

With the senior population a favorite target of the disease, stories like Chambers’ have been common during the pandemic.

But following January’s case surge, the picture has improved.

The American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living—a group representing more than 14,000 nursing homes and long term care facilities across the country that provide care to approximately 5 million people each year— released a report this week that shows U.S. nursing homes are experiencing the lowest number of new COVID cases since last May. Recent data show nursing homes have seen an 82% decline in new cases among residents since the peak of the pandemic during the week of Dec. 20 of last year.

“We still have a long road ahead, but these numbers are incredibly encouraging and a major morale booster for frontline caregivers who have been working tirelessly every day for a year to protect our residents,” said Mark Parkinson, American Health Care Association chief executive.