America’s Nursing Homes Are Bracing for an Outbreak
As the disease caused by the coronavirus has spread in a nursing home near Seattle, other facilities around the country are implementing plans to mitigate risk.
As of Wednesday, nine people in the United States had died from confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. All nine of them died in the Seattle area, and seven of them lived in the same place in the suburb of Kirkland: Life Care Center, a nursing home with roughly 200 beds. Health officials have confirmed that several other people with connections to the home, including staff members and a visitor, have been infected too.
Operators of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities around the country—which house each year—are watching the developments in Kirkland from afar, and coming up with plans to prevent the same things from happening on
