LANSING, Mich. – A top health official on Wednesday defended Michigan's handling of nursing home residents infected with the coronavirus, contending its performance has been “strong” compared with other states and again dismissing critical Republicans' call for facilities that house only COVID-19 patients.
Robert Gordon, director of the state Department of Health and Human Services, said just two states — Florida and Massachusetts — tried the approach and have abandoned it. Majority GOP lawmakers and some Democrats have criticized Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for letting recovering patients stay in or return to homes as long as they are isolated from uninfected residents.
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“There are many complexities to standing up and creating entire facilities for only COVID-positive people,” he told a joint legislative oversight committee. “There are many risks around it.”
If existing facilities were used, uninfected people would have to be transferred out, he said. A new facility would have “limited utility” in a state as large as Michigan, he said, “and you still need to staff, provide equipment and license that facility.”
Gordon said he did not disagree with critics questioning the common sense of allowing positive patients to return to homes where they are isolated until they fully recover, but the “profoundly imperfect” strategy is “functioning reasonably well.”
He also said allegations that Michigan forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients from hospitals in the spring are “false." The department in April quickly heard concerns about a provision in a Whitmer order and did not implement it, he said.
The virus has contributed to the deaths of 2,124 nursing home residents, who account for nearly 31% of the state's confirmed or probable deaths. The national rate was nearly 39% four weeks ago, Gordon said.
Sen. Aric Nesbitt, a Lawton Republican, pressed Gordon on why the administration “ignored” a March email from the leader of the Health Care Association of Michigan — a nursing home industry group — suggesting the use of empty and new unlicensed facilities as quarantine centers to avoid infections inside nursing homes.
“Our view at the time and our view now is that the creation of COVID-only facilities involves challenges,” he said.
Sen. Kim LaSata, a Republican from Berrien County's Bainbridge Township, said she was shocked when the state allowed positive patients to be returned to their nursing homes after a Seattle-area nursing home had one of the first major reported outbreaks in the country.
“I'm not a scientist, not a doctor,” she said. “But I knew we had to protect those individuals and you're putting them back in the same facilities as healthy patients, but very vulnerable patients. I would have thought that you would have done more to look at separate facilities."
Whitmer and her administration have pointed to researchers who say community spread — the extent to which the virus is in areas surrounding nursing homes — is the strongest predictor of cases and outbreaks inside the facilities.
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