Long Beach VA Confirms Multiple Staff Members, Patients Positive for COVID-19

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UPDATED AT 2:09 p.m. 3/31/2020 with new county COVID-19 confirmed case numbers and first county healthcare worker death.

Multiple VA Long Beach Healthcare System employees have tested positive for COVID-19, hospital officials said, though specific numbers were not disclosed.

This is the first publicly reported incidence of hospital employees testing positive for the respiratory virus in Long Beach.

At least 185 VA employees in the nation have tested positive for the novel coronavirus as of late last week, Mark Takano (D-Calif.), chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said Friday on the House floor.

Employees contracting coronavirus is not only a growing concern at VA Long Beach, but for hospital leaders and healthcare workers across the city and beyond, as the number of cases are expected to continue their rapid uptick in the Southland. In LA County there were 3,011 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday afternoon, a nearly five-fold increase from a week prior.

Of those cases, “dozens” have been healthcare workers, said LA County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer during a briefing Monday. The county today confirmed its first healthcare worker death.

Long Beach VA spokesperson Richard Beam did not say what employee category those who were infected at his facility fell into or whether any of them were Long Beach residents.

“Every healthcare worker is at risk regardless of role and it’s not just born on the ‘direct patient care teams,’” he said.

According to Beam, employees who test positive for the coronavirus are self-quarantining at home and are under the care of their primary care physician.

“The employee would not be allowed to return to duty until cleared by both their own physician, but additionally, our occupational health team,” Beam said.

The Veterans Health Administration – Office of Emergency Management’s COVID-19 Response Plan has said that absenteeism caused in part by illness or fear of illness could cut staff levels across the board by up to 40% if the outbreak becomes widespread enough.

Long Beach VA Director Walt Dannenberg also confirmed that multiple veterans have tested positive for COVID-19 at the facility. However, Dannenberg would not give a definitive tally or say where the patients were from. This announcement comes two weeks after the hospital reported its first COVID-19 patient, who was not a Long Beach resident.

Meanwhile, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases citywide has doubled as of Friday to 115.

Dannenberg said his VA facility is preparing for the trickle of cases to turn into an “impending surge” of infections.

Last week Mayor Robert Garcia warned of a grim reality if the public does not heed the state’s stay-at-home order and practice social distancing.

“We will not have enough (hospital) beds to be able to treat everyone that needs support,” he said at a press conference.

The hope of health officials is that by limiting crowds and interpersonal interactions as much as possible, the rate of infection will be kept from reaching levels that could overrun and cripple the healthcare system, as has happened in New York City and parts of Italy.

Efforts to shore up capacity and reduce transmission of the virus are underway at the Long Beach VA facility. This comes after a surprise visit by the Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General earlier in the month found several shortcomings in the facility’s COVID-19 response, including lax visitor restrictions.

Tomisin Oluwole
Ode to Pink II, 2020
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Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

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Visiting hours have now been completely eliminated and the hospital is postponing elective medical procedures while encouraging virtual consultations—sometimes referred to as “telemedicine”—when possible to lower traffic at the facility.

Staff is also rushing to retool hospital wards in an effort to increase the number of beds, including those used for intensive care, Dannenberg said. Currently the hospital is authorized to operate 400 beds.

Although shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) have been reported at hospitals around the nation, causing consternation among healthcare workers, Dannenburg said that the Long Beach VA has an “appropriate amount” of PPE for its staff.

“We are working to make sure that we’re maximizing our resources so we can maintain those appropriate levels for our staff,” he said.

Makeshift screening stations have been set up outside of the hospital’s doors and anyone who walks up is being asked a series of questions to determine if they are symptomatic or have been at risk of contracting COVID-19. Even hospital employees are being checked.

Tents have been erected on the parking lot in front of the hospital where chest X-rays and other coronavirus-related testing is being conducted to keep those suspected of having the illness away from other patients.

On Monday, the hospital began in-house lab testing for COVID-19, Dannenberg said.

“We’re no longer having to send our samples out to other VA’s or reference labs in the community which are backlogged and taking a while,” he said.

The Long Beach VA, which has 16 ICU beds, is currently still only treating veterans, but if area hospitals become overwhelmed by coronavirus patients, at least some part of the VA could be opened up to non-veterans, as was the case recently in New York City

“If there was a time where the surge reached a point where there was a need for the VA to jump in, (we would) activate what we call the fourth mission,” Dannenberg said.

The fourth mission refers to the VA’s mandate to serve as a back up during national emergencies such as war, a natural disaster, or in this case, a public health crisis.

But for that to happen, a city or county would need to request that the facility loosen its admission requirements, and the ultimate decision would lie with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Dannenburg said that such a request has yet to be made of the Long Beach VA.

The Long Beach Joint Information Center did not reply to an email seeking confirmation as of press time.

However, the same inspector general report that found issues with Long Beach VA’s COVID-19 measures, also said that the facility’s leaders had no written agreements in place to share ICU beds or personal protective equipment supplies with other community hospitals.

We asked Long Beach VA officials whether this has changed since the report was issued, but have not received a response by press time. We will update this story when we hear back.

Additional research by Kevin Flores.

COVID-19 VA Veteran Resources:

  • Nurse Advice Line for healthcare-related questions: 877-252-4866
  • Check appointments, look up lab results, refill prescriptions, and more on the VA’s online portal
  • VA Long Beach on Facebook
  • VA Long Beach on Twitter

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

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