Miami-Dade wants COVID-19 reports from nursing homes, won’t rely on state data

Dissatisfied with the reliability of the coronavirus information being released by the state, Miami-Dade’s mayor is ordering nursing homes and assisted-living facilities to disclose COVID-19 cases and deaths from residents and employees in an attempt to produce data the state has been reluctant to release.

An emergency order signed Wednesday by Mayor Carlos Gimenez instructs residential health facilities to disclose the data when asked by Miami-Dade. The county plans to require daily reports.

Miami-Dade wants all prior COVID-19 deaths from the facilities, as well as a running tally of cases from residents and staff. The county also wants a report of the number of people living at the facilities with the virus and dates for the last time employees with the virus were at work.

Miami-Dade will also track the number of residents sent to hospitals for coronavirus treatment, a metric that will give a fuller picture of problems at facilities that see lower population numbers by hospitalizing people.

The administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis only recently began releasing data tied to coronavirus and individual nursing homes. News organizations, including The Miami Herald, launched legal proceedings against the state to force disclosure of COVID-19 information for nursing homes before the Department of Health began releasing the data.

For the past two weeks, the state has been revising the amount of information it releases about COVID-19 cases and deaths at nursing homes and assisted living facilities. For example, last week the Department of Health began listing the cumulative number of positive cases per facility but, after several elder-care homes complained that the data was out-of-date and filled with inaccuracies, the state started to list only currently positive cases.

Jennifer Moon, the Gimenez deputy overseeing health facilities, said the county was unable to get reliable nursing-home and assisted-living data from Florida and decided to require local reports.

“We started getting it yesterday,” Moon said of the state numbers. “It seems to have some kind of delay.”

Florida currently makes public the number of deaths and cases at individual nursing home and assisted-living facilities. The county report will contain extra information, including past cases, hospitalizations and when infected employees were last at work.

While the county requests exceed what Florida makes public about COVID-19 and nursing homes, it falls short of the data the state collects daily but keeps confidential.

That includes the number of staff and residents who have been tested for the coronavirus in each facility, a datapoint that could give the public a measure of how well the facility has done at preventing the disease through asymptomatic carriers. The Miami Herald, along with the consortium of news organizations, is continuing to pursue its legal action in order to obtain those records.

Miami-Dade said it wanted more data to get a clearer picture of COVID-19’s threat to residential facilities for the ill and elderly.

“This is a critical element of ultimately being able to open up — protecting our most vulnerable population,” Moon said. “We wanted to make sure we were having a daily accounting of what’s happening.”

This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 5:07 PM.