Keys have had 12 positive cases since Friday. They’re all from one nursing home
Between late April and early May, the number of people who tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the Florida Keys hovered between 75 and 80 people.
Over the weekend, the number shot up to 92, and health officials say it is slightly higher. All the new cases come from one nursing home in Plantation Key.
On Friday, one of the owners of the Crystal Health and Rehab Center reported nine residents and one employee tested positive for COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, after the Florida Department of Health began a mass testing operation at the 120-bed facility earlier in the week.
By Monday, Monroe County’s top health official said the numbers increased to 11 residents and three employees.
A total of 70 staffers and 80 residents were tested by a multi-agency response team sent by the Department of Health earlier this month after two women at the facility died within days of a speech therapist testing positive.
Results showed the women did not have COVID-19 when they died, but health officials and Crystal Health’s owners were still concerned about the disease spreading within the building after the employee tested positive.
Bob Eadie, administrator of the state Department of Health in Monroe County, said most tests have come back from a Tallahassee lab, but not all the results have been released because some tests were inconclusive and those people must be re-swabbed.
Jake Walden, one of the facility’s owners, said all residents who tested positive have been moved to a wing of the building that is now designated for treating patients with COVID-19. Their families have been notified, he said.
Walden also said that group activities were canceled and the facility is not accepting any more residents.
Visitation to nursing homes and other assisted-living facilities has been prohibited in Florida since mid-March.
Still, some families of Crystal Health residents say management there has not reached out enough to update them on their loved ones’ conditions, and they have not been transparent about the test results.
“While we were all celebrating Mother’s Day today with our own families, these people were struggling to just find out if their loved ones were okay,” Key Largo resident Marlen Weeks posted on her Facebook page Sunday. “That’s not too much to ask under the circumstances after almost 8 weeks of not seeing or hearing from their relatives.”
Weeks has been vocal about what she considers Monroe County’s inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the beginning. She is now helping relatives of Crystal Health’s residents try to get more information about what is happening inside that facility, and she organized a protest outside the facility Sunday.
Lourdes Tolbert’s father-in-law has been a Crystal Health resident for four years. She said since the pandemic, she and her husband have had difficulty reaching him by phone. She said most of the time when she calls now, no one answers the phone or if someone does, she gets transferred to the administrator’s office and the call goes to voicemail and is not returned.
Tolbert said she’s been finding out more about what’s happening inside the facility from the media than she is from Crystal Health.
“I don’t want to hear that an employee tested positive and that there were two deaths, and then more positives from a newspaper article,” she wrote on Facebook. “This is what is so wrong with this situation.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 5:50 PM.
