TORONTO -- Only a few months ago, family members could easily stroll into Anson Place Care Centre, an Ontario long-term care home, to visit their loved ones.
Now the only visitors to Anson Place are from the funeral home, coming to remove the latest victims of COVID-19.
After staff at the care home blew the whistle on the lack of safety precautions being taken to safeguard residents and workers within the facility, officials at Anson Place say they are implementing strategies to manage the outbreak.
But with 70 people already having tested positive for the virus, and 19 people dead in total -- four more having died Tuesday, according to a statement from Anson Place -- many officials are saying the facility should’ve moved much faster.
“There’s so many actions that should have come into play really quickly as soon as it was known that these were the risks to the residents, and they didn’t (implement them),” Vicki McKenna, president of the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA), told CTV News.
On March 18, Anson Place, located in Hagersville, Ont., about an hour southwest of Toronto, was first warned by the local public health office of a potential transmission of COVID-19.
Between that warning and when the first resident died nine days later, staff were not told about a potential outbreak, according to ONA. And even as the positive cases and deaths started to pile up, proper protective equipment was not provided for staff.
“It takes your breath away to think that, A) they were so slow to act, and B) that the measures put in place were wholly inadequate,” said McKenna.
Rebecca Shaw-Piironen, a personal support worker at Anson Place, told CTV News on Monday that the conditions within the facility were “dire,” describing cramped quarters and little attempts to keep patients separate from healthy residents.
“The magnitude of this… my heart just aches. Me and me and my coworkers, we were just so sad right now,” she said.
As of Monday, 30 staff members had also tested positive for the virus, adding to the difficulty of caring for the patients and residents at risk.
The ONA have filed three separate complaints with the Ministry of Labour, which investigating the allegations that the care home did not react quickly enough to the threat.
They also warned the local medical officer of health on April 9 that residents who had tested positive for COVID-19 were still sharing bathrooms with healthy residents, and that ward units -- where residents live four to a room -- still contained a mix of COVID-19 positive patients and those who had not tested positive.
In response to these criticisms, Anson Place originally said in a letter that there was “a privacy curtain between these beds which will mitigate the spread of COVID-19” -- a claim that flies in the face of what health officials have been repeating for weeks about physical distance as well as the need for those with symptoms to self-isolate.
“There … certainly has to be better barriers that can be put in place rather than sheets or curtains,” said McKenna.
Anson Place announced Tuesday in their statement that they are “implementing directives to manage the outbreak,” including isolating patients who have tested positive for COVID-19, and ramping up sanitizing protocols.
Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said on Monday that nearly half of all the COVID-19 deaths in the country were linked to outbreaks in long-term care homes.
And with many vulnerable residents still at Anson Place, it’s clear that even with more safeguards in place, the days ahead will likely contain more tragedy.