The new coronavirus continues to spread in congregate settings throughout North Carolina, which include nursing homes, residential care facilities, jails, prisons, shelters and migrant farm housing.
More than a dozen such facilities have been added to the list with confirmed cases of COVID-19, the condition caused by the virus, which poses a serious risk of illness or death in around half of North Carolina’s population due to medical conditions or age.
[The latest: North Carolina coronavirus daily updates]
You can now search by county or facility name to see which ones have outbreaks of COVID-19. (See the table below.) You can also click on the top of each column to sort the list by data category, county or facility name.
This data was provided to a collaboration of North Carolina newsrooms after weeks of seeking data on positive coronavirus tests on residents at congregate living facilities. For weeks, journalists had written about outbreaks at nursing homes around the state, but DHHS was not releasing information about specific outbreaks.
Carolina Public Press, the News & Observer, the Charlotte Observer, WRAL, WECT and WBTV collectively threatened to sue the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services to force disclosure of these records.
Advocacy group AARP also wrote a letter to Gov. Roy Cooper and urged him to release the information in the interest of public health. Several other media organizations across the state and nationally, including The New York Times, also joined the legal coalition.
In late April, DHHS reversed its stance on identifying nursing homes with outbreaks. Among nursing homes with the largest outbreaks, the news collaboration has discovered a track record of lax practices and disease control protocols.
DHHS defines an outbreak as two or more people with the disease at a facility, which can include staff members.
See below for a searchable database of information that has been publicly released about outbreaks at nursing homes across North Carolina. It will be updated as more information is released.
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I want to commend the nursing home I know best, and the associated assisted living one. I live at Pisgah Valley and am not in either of these, nor are we allowed to visit them. But we do get news, official and unofficial, and my strong impression is that the management has done an excellent job. Of course, luck does play a role. Staff have to leave the facility. But I think management is part of it.
This post will be updated as further information is available.