Lawsuit: Family Of COVID-19 Victim Accuses NC Nursing Home Of Fueling Deadly Outbreak
Wednesday, April 22, 2020 | COVID-19 | Author: Michael Gordon | Original Article
A new lawsuit claims that chronic neglect and a botched response by a Salisbury nursing home fueled one of North Carolina’s largest outbreaks of COVID-19.
The complaint, filed Tuesday in Mecklenburg Superior Court, also provides a glimpse into pandemic hell.
Over its 20 pages, the court filing presents a virtual real-time account of how the outbreak seemingly overwhelmed The Citadel Salisbury and helped turn rural Rowan County into one of North Carolina’s worst COVID-19 hot spots.
As of this week, more than 100 residents and employees of the nursing home have tested positive for the potentially lethal disease. An unknown number have died. Overall, Rowan has reported 17 deaths.
Kim Morrow, a spokeswoman for the corporate owner of The Citadel Salisbury, said the lawsuit is attempting to exploit a worldwide crisis.
“Instead of responding to baseless and unfounded accusations, we would instead like to acknowledge the sacrifices being made by not only the staff at the Citadel Salisbury, but all healthcare workers.”
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Citadel resident Marjorie Garvin, whom the complaint says contracted COVID-19 after moving into the nursing home in February. She is now described as being seriously ill.
Garvin’s family blames the facility and its corporate owner, Accordius Health, for creating “a lethal and growing reservoir” for the outbreak by failing to address longstanding hygienic problems as well as operating the facility with an undersized and unresponsive staff that failed to properly react when the disease slipped inside the nursing home’s doors.
After failing to protect residents and staff, the lawsuit claims The Citadel and Accordius kept frantic families in the dark for days about the safety of their loved ones.
On April 13, when an emergency room doctor at a nearby hospital called several families to tell them that their loved ones from The Citadel were near death, the families said they did not know their relatives had contracted COVID-19.
Accordius, which is owned by a New Jersey private equity firm, owns and operates nursing homes throughout North Carolina and the Charlotte region. It has an office in the Ballantyne area as well as facilities in Charlotte, Gastonia, Statesville, Mooresville and Monroe, among other sites.
In her statement for Accordius, Morrow said the nursing home had put emergency precautions in place before the first COVID-19 case at the facility had been confirmed on April 7.
She said the outbreak of cases was not due to neglect. Instead, it is “inextricably linked with the population it serves and the insidious nature of how the virus spreads.”
Salisbury attorney Mona Lisa Wallace, a partner in the firm that filed the complaint, said The Citadel and its owners made the outbreak within its walls almost inevitable.
“… We believe the company should have done much more to anticipate and guard against the COVID-19 virus before it was too late.”
Nursing homes across the country have been a frequent target of the pandemic due to the age and health of the residents. A February outbreak in a Kirkland, Wash., facility offered an early warning of the potential deadliness of the disease.
As of April 10, some 2,500 nursing facilities in 36 states were battling COVID-19 outbreaks, five times the number of cases from 10 days before, according to NBC News. At least 2,200 nursing home residents had died.
In their complaint, Garvin’s family says they were cut off from her once the pandemic surfaced at The Citadel.
The suit describes a sickened Garvin calling her family to ask why she had been moved from her $11,000-a-month private room to a bedroom in the “quarantine hall” that she shared with a victim of COVID-19.
The family says they were never told about the move and then were repeatedly rebuffed by The Citadel staff when they sought information about Garvin’s condition.
Garvin’s family finally visited her at The Citadel on Monday.
“When they were escorted to the quarantine hall,” the lawsuit says, “it was like walking into a death ward.”
According to the lawsuit, problems at the facility continue to surface.
As recently as Monday, another elderly Citadel resident called her son to say she needed to go to the bathroom but no one from the staff would help her, the lawsuit claims. When Salisbury police repeatedly called the nursing home seeking information about the woman, no one picked up.
When an officer then went to The Citadel and knocked on the door, no one answered.