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Hamilton County releases list of nursing homes with COVID-19 deaths

NOBLESVILLE, Ind. (WISH) — The Hamilton County Health Department announced Wednesday it would begin publicly identifying long-term care facilities with coronavirus-related deaths.

Death figures for individual facilities would be reported every Monday, according to a county spokesperson.

State health officials have repeatedly declined to release the same information for long-term care facilities across Indiana.

“I will not,” Gov. Eric Holcomb said Friday when asked if he would direct the state health commissioner to publicly identify facilities with confirmed COVID-19 cases. “And the reason is because we respect private business; that nursing home that is operating under our regulations.”

Guidance issued April 19 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires nursing homes to report COVID-19 cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and notify residents and residents’ families.

Abby Ariraimu, an Indianapolis resident whose mother is recovering from COVID-19 at a Marion County nursing home, said she feared facilities struggling to retain staff and contain outbreaks wouldn’t immediately update their notification protocol.

She applauded Hamilton County health officials’ decision to release long-term care facility data on their own and urged state health officials to follow suit.

“They should let people know what’s going on in these nursing homes with COVID-19,” Ariraimu said. “I haven’t heard nothing [from my mother’s nursing home] since the day they called me and told me that she tested positive.”

Before receiving the call, she didn’t know her mother was symptomatic or scheduled for a COVID-19 test.

Ariraimu claimed Genesis Healthcare Decatur Township Center also didn’t notify her when her mother was placed on oxygen or moved to a different room.

She only learned another resident at the facility contracted COVID-19 and died from complications when she visited Wednesday and spoke with her mother from outside a window, she added.

“She’s the one who told me,” Ariraimu said. “It was a friend of hers. She would eat lunch and dinner with the lady, and everything.”

Genesis Healthcare Decatur Township Center did not immediately respond to inquiries from News 8.

Hamilton County health officials said the information they chose to release would otherwise be made public in “segments” through a series of media requests.

“A person could review our ‘Public Index of Death’ report, which listed a person’s name, age and date of death. With a little work, a list could independently be compiled through the requests of individual death records. We felt like this information, while not necessarily being empowering to the community, was still becoming public. A decision was made that complete information was better than incomplete information.”


Hamilton County Long-Term Care Facility Deaths
(As of April 27, 2020)

Carmel Health & Living: 10 
Hamilton Trace: 7 
The Stratford: 6 
The Hearth at Windermere: 5 
Brookdale Carmel: 3 
Harbour Manor: 3 
Grand Brook Memory Care: 2 
Heritage Woods: 1 
Maple Park: 1