There are now 16 long-term care facilities with COVID-19 cases in Long Beach, according to city officials, double the number they reported just a day earlier.
Kate Kuykendall, a spokesperson for the city’s Joint Information Center, on Monday said the reason for the spike was that the city’s previous number of eight facilities was “inaccurate and did not fully reflect the total number of cases.”
“The previous number did not take into account some combination of the facilities with cleared cases and/or facilities with less than two cases,” she wrote in an email.
Long-term care facilities have been hard hit by the virus, accounting for 177 of Long Beach’s 582 cases. The death toll there has also been hefty—25 of the city’s 31 coronavirus fatalities are connected with long-term care facilities.
Long Beach has only specifically identified seven out of the 16 facilities. They have not said how many deaths are associated with each facility. The city is only including names of facilities in its daily briefing if those places have active cases or more than two cases, health officials said.
Health care facilities and other institutional settings have also been hard-hit across Los Angeles County, accounting for roughly 45% of COVID-19 fatalities.
Long Beach and the county have pledged to begin testing residents and staff at nursing facilities regardless of whether they show any symptoms. Testing had previously been reserved only for people showing symptoms of COVID-19, a move that county officials now concede may have fueled the spread of the virus.
“Early on in this pandemic, we were all unaware that COVID-19 could be spread by people who were infected but did not have any symptoms, and this unfortunately has resulted in the spread of the virus even where everybody has been doing their very best to implement infection-control measures with the information that we had at the time,” LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said. “So I apologize on behalf of all of us for not knowing enough at the start of this epidemic to take additional steps in our congregate living facilities to make sure we were doing everything possible to protect residents and staff.”
As of Monday, 312 institutional settings had reported at least one COVID-19 case, including nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, shelters, jails and prisons, Ferrer said.
Overall, county officials reported 900 new COVID-19 cases and 29 new deaths today. That brings the countywide totals to 942 fatalities and over 20,400 confirmed cases.
COVID-19 has continued to disproportionately affect black and poor residents, Fererr said.
The rate of infection among the black population per 100,000 residents is “significantly higher” than other races, according to Ferrer, and people who live in areas with high rates of poverty had three times the rate of death compared to wealthier areas.
“This data is deeply disturbing,” she said.
City News Service contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: this story was updated with more information from the city about the spike in facilities.