Florida Keys nursing home resident dies from COVID-19, Health Department confirms
A 91-year-old woman who died over the weekend from the novel coronavirus was a resident of a Florida Keys nursing home that has become a cluster for the disease.
Crystal Health and Rehab Center on Plantation Key has recently drawn the scrutiny of the state agency that regulates nursing homes and other long-term care facilities because management did not report the deaths of 13 people there to the Florida Department of Health between March and April.
Seven of those people were suspected of having COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, according to a May 2 report from the Agency for Health Care Administration.
It remains unclear if their bodies were tested for the virus. In the report, titled “Statement of Deficiencies,” the facility’s medical director told investigators that she ordered tests for those residents.
However, Bob Eadie, Monroe County administrator for the Department of Health, said he does not think the tests were conducted, and the health department has no way of knowing if they were because the people have long been embalmed or cremated.
The Department of Health’s Tallahassee office released a statement late last week saying that if the tests were conducted, that information would be provided by the county medical examiner.
However, the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office in early May said it never received any deceased people from Crystal Health.
Crystal Health owners did not respond to requests for comment for this report.
The woman who died there over the weekend had “underlying chronic health conditions,” said health department spokeswoman Brandie Peretz. She was the fourth person to die of COVID-19 in the Keys and the only person so far at a nursing home.
No other nursing home in Monroe County, including Bayshore Manor in Key West, has positive COVID-19 cases, Eadie said.
A Department of Health “strike team” has been at Crystal Health since earlier this month testing all 80 residents and 70 staff members. According to the latest information from the Department of Health, 22 people there — 15 residents and seven employees — have tested positive.
The facility makes up the largest concentration of COVID-19 cases outside of the city of Key West, where 41 people have tested positive, according to the Health Department. In all, 107 people have tested positive in the Keys.
The team was deployed after two elderly women died at the facility within days of a staff speech therapist testing positive for COVID-19. Later tests revealed the women did not have the illness.
Testing at Crystal Health is ongoing, Eadie, said, and some people must be re-tested because their original results were inconclusive, he said Tuesday.
Statewide, 52,255 people have tested positive for COVID-19, and 2,259 people have died from the virus, according to the latest available data from the Department of Health.
