◼ COVID-19 / GOVERNMENT Bloomberg Businessweek March 16, 202020
How did
South Korea
get ahead?
● How did the area handle the rapidly
growing number of cases?The consequences were deadly for residents of Life
Care Center, a nursing home in the Seattle suburb
of Kirkland that houses elderly and often very sick
patients. February was an unusually busy period for
911 calls to the home, says Evan Hurley, a Kirkland
firefighter and union representative. The number
went from seven in January to 33 for February and
the first few days of March, he says, citing call logs
later used to track which staffers needed to be quar-
antined. Firefighters weren’t always wearing masks;
sometimes the calls were for a nosebleed or some
other problem, Hurley says. But by late February,
he recalls, a lieutenant remarked about the num-
ber of recent visits to Life Care for breathing issues
and fever. A captain shared the concern with the
county. Then, on Feb. 28, came word that a patient
transferred from the home had Covid-19. The fire
department declared the facility a “hot zone” requir-
ing full protective gear. An initial group of 17 firefight-
ers was quarantined. The next day, state officials
announced the first death in the U.S. attributed to the
new coronavirus and said that more than 50 people
associated with Life Care were sick and being tested.
The facility’s low-slung building in a nondescript
part of town dotted with condos became the center of
an unfolding crisis. Authorities dramatically increased
public warnings—while, families contended, doing
little to save people in the home. “They are being left
to be picked off one by one by this disease,” Kevin
Connolly, a relative, told television reporters outside.
King County officials quickly moved to purchase a
motel and set up modular housing to isolate patients,
a jarring escalation. Within days of the first deaths,
they advised people older than 60 to stay away
from public places, while avoiding a total ban on big
events. A comic-book convention planned for down-
town Seattle held out until March 6 before canceling.
“We are determined to protect those who are most
vulnerable—our older residents, those with compro-
mised immune systems—and, in doing those things,
we also want to protect our economy,” King County
Executive Dow Constantine told reporters.
Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and other
companies told Seattle-area staff to work from home
if possible, and the University of Washington shifted
to online classes for the rest of the quarter ending
March 20. As of March 8, King County reported 83 cases
and 17 deaths, all but one tied to the nursing home.
The challenge for the health system is that in the
vast majority of cases, symptoms remain mild—but
some percentage of people require hospitalization.At Providence in Everett, where patient zero was
treated, bed space could become an issue. The hospi-
tal has started a program to discharge stable patients,
Diaz says. They’re sent home with a thermometer
and an oximeter, a measurer of respiratory health.
Readings are transmitted to Providence, and if the
patient’s condition worsens, he or she can quickly
be returned to the hospital. Ten patients were in the
program on March 8, Diaz says.
Still, some people complain that area hospitals
aren’t consistently following protocols to isolate pos-
sible cases. On a doctor’s orders, Alicia Hansen on
March 3 took her mother, who’s had cancer multiple
times, to the Swedish Hospital First Hill emergency
room after she developed fever and breathing dif-
ficulties. She and her mother lived together not far
from the nursing home in Kirkland. According to
Hansen, some hospital staff were in and out of her
mother’s room without masks in their first 45 min-
utes at the facility. Hansen herself, who could have
been exposed to the virus, was mixed with the gen-
eral population in a waiting room while her mother
was treated and tested for Covid-19. The test came
back negative, but her mother died on March 7. A
spokesman says the hospital is following WHO’s guide-
lines for dealing with potential Covid-19 patients.
At Life Care on March 6, 15 more people were
hospitalized within 24 hours. Within days, infec-
tions began turning up in other homes. The facility
also serves as a short-term rehabilitation center, and
firefighter Hurley says some of those patients were
discharged to other places in the weeks before the
spread of the virus was known. (Life Care says the
first patient later diagnosed was picked up from the
home on Feb. 19. Hurley says it may have been as
early as Jan. 22, based on call logs.) “We don’t think
we’re anywhere near the end of this,” Hurley says.
“This spread is not limited to Life Care.”
On March 6, a nursing home in Issaquah, a sub-
urb east of Seattle, said a resident tested positive for
Covid-19. Four days later, county health officials said
10 long-term care facilities had positive cases. All
told, 31 Kirkland firefighters have been quarantined—
almost a third of the department—in addition to 10
from other communities, as well as some relatives.
Bedford, the genome expert, is working with
researchers from the University of Washington to
understand the extent of the spread. In early March
the university started using its own virus test, a mod-
ified version of one the World Health Organization
created. When a positive result is found in a sample,
the researchers perform a second round of tests to
sequence the viral genome. Pavitra Roychoudhury,
a university researcher in charge of sequencing, says
technicians have been working late into the night● Number of cases
in King County as of
March 883