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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard of 14 people dying in a 120-bed nursing home of the seasonal flu in a 3 week time span either, but the Coronavirus is making that happen in Kirkland, WA right now. Actually, about 30 people have died, but since they don't have enough tests, they can't say that it was Coronavirus.

My wife is an administrator at a Nursing facility that is much larger, and this many people DYING so quickly is terrifying.

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I was able to look at the press release from this nursing home this morning, and the numbers are far worse than this.

The number is much higher than that, as there are an additional 12 deaths that haven't been tested for coronavirus yet. 26 have died in the last three weeks as compared to 7 in a typical month.

Another 26 are in the hospital, with the rest being quarantined at the home. Over 1/3rd of the staff there is showing symptoms ~70/180 people.

Do you have a source for those numbers?

Not op, but this is from 2 days ago: https://imgur.com/ImZhrlj

I think this tweet contains some of those stats: https://twitter.com/dave_bomberg/status/1236521426259042310?...

"The deaths associated with the facility, according to Killian, amount to 26 between Feb. 19 and March 7. That includes 15 patients who have died in local hospitals. Of those 15, 13 have positively tested for coronavirus."

https://www.bellevuereporter.com/news/life-care-center-of-ki...

It’s more like 18 or 19 confirmed now. 30 of 120 in the facility as of 19 Feb have died. Usually 3-7 per month die.

Please do not consider this comment to be commentary on the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, especially considering the situation at the nursing home in Washington state.

Out of curiosity, I tried to find examples where many people died of a flu outbreak in nursing homes. Here are some articles I found:

This article describes a nursing home in Sheffield where 9 of 60 residents died from the flu during the 1997--1998 season: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e54b/27d527dd0612d0899f22ea...

This article describes a nursing home in Honolulu where 6 of 37 residents died from the flu during the 1989--1990 season: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7657975

This article describes a nursing home in Los Angeles where 8 of 101 residents died from RSV in 1979: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6527041

This article describes a nursing home in Devon where 4 of 50 residents died from RSV within one week: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6736667

I guess one thing would be, this was likely the first acute care nursing home hit which may be closer to taking a random sample of what it would do to any given one (though community spread wasn't known about yet, and later ones may have rapid tests available to limit spread and enforce quarantine). Whereas those are probably the worst hit of many. This one seems to be possibly 20 or so of 140 as well (testing not done yet), but the 9/60 case would still be worse.

Do you have any numbers or is it just anecdotal? Because when worked in a nursing home back the day, the seasonal flus was already bad enough, so...

I'm not OP, but it's a quick search. "Nineteen of those who died in King County were residents of Life Care Center, a nursing home in Kirkland, according to Public Health - Seattle & King County. Researchers say the virus may have been circulating undetected for weeks."[0]

[0] - https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/coronavirus-number-confirme...

Yeah, they are saying now that there's a 5 day incubation period for COVID19.

Without widespread testing, we are going to have no idea how bad this is and how seriously fast we need to lock down facilities, particularly nursing homes, and this particular nursing home has shown that in a lot of places, the disease is going to strike and kill FAST.

I was referring to the fact that nobody died fothe flu the last time it was around. usually, at least over here, you don't conduct that level of testing.

Which indicates one really big issue. People are, for a large degree, scared by numbers now. Not because the nmbers look black death level bad, but rather because there are no numbers on stuf like, say, the flu or some other disease out there to compare them against. Not blaming people for it, that's just how numbers work, not just for diseases.

bad thing is, nobody is addressing this, or anything else related to testing, numbers and so on, in the public. Which includes TV, internet, papers... Instead we have fake news spreading. This fake news is then erroding trust in official information. And as a reult you have to sides, one that believes the virus is at most a flu and the other one believing it will at least be the spanish flu if not the black death. Both are wrong, but the true facts are not getting through. Also the official information is badly presented.

My wife said they didn't lose a single resident to diagnosed flu last year.

26 people have died in a matter of weeks at that nursing home from Coronavirus.

If this thing gets into these other facilities, it's going to wipe them out.

Do people typically die of diagnosed flu? It's my understanding that most flu deaths are undiagnosed, which is why the CDC's ranges for flu deaths are always so broad; they're estimating how many pneumonia deaths they think were caused by the flu season.

That's why I said "diagnosed" because people die of pneumonia from time to time, and this can sometimes be a result of having the flu, but the pneumonia is apparent, but not necessarily that they previously had the flu.

So they didn't diagnose for flu. But they diagnosed for COVID-19. Got it.

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