A Fresno treatment facility reopens after weeks of lockdown over COVID-19 outbreak
A WestCare residential facility in Fresno on Thursday reopened after a COVID-19 outbreak prompted a quarantine lockdown since July 20, with staff and clients – including three children – sheltering in place, an official confirmed to The Bee.
The facility on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard went into “shelter in place” last month after a series of COVID-19 infections among staff and clients. The residential facility provides drug and alcohol treatment to men, women and women with children, said Shawn A. Jenkins, deputy chief operating officer for WestCare Foundation-Western Region.
WestCare and Fresno County were initially silent on the issue. WestCare provided information on the outbreak, and subsequent shutdown, days after The Bee submitted to Fresno County a Public Records Act request that is pending.
The facility offered testing to all its 94 staff members and all clients. A total of 48 staff and clients tested positive, prompting the quarantine shutdown of the facility effective at 5 p.m. on July 20, according to a three-page statement to The Bee from Jenkins.
On July 22, WestCare informed its community partners of the situation.
Some of the clients are homeless when they reach WestCare, others are referred by the Fresno County Department of Behavioral Health or the California Department of Corrections, Jenkins said during an interview. Other clients seek services on their own.
Twenty of the facility’s 94-person staff remained inside with clients during the lockdown, according to Jenkins’ statement. WestCare had to pay the 20 staffers round-the-clock for the entire quarantine period, a cost estimated to be over $200,000.
A total of 24 women, three children and 60 men were isolated at the facility during the lockdown, Jenkins said.
“It wasn’t a cheap thing. It would have been cheaper to send everybody away...but you have people that have drug and alcohol issues, some of them don’t have any place to go. Where are we going to send them to, the streets?” Jenkins said during an interview. “I think we did the responsible thing and sheltered in place.”
As of Wednesday, of those on lockdown inside the facility, three staff members were still testing positive as well as three clients. The 20 staffers will get a few days off after sheltering in place, Jenkins said.
Two of the three staffers who were still positive as of Wednesday couldn’t go home, so WestCare is paying for a hotel on their behalf, Jenkins said.
Most staffers who weren’t isolated at the facility worked from home during the lockdown but returned to the office Thursday. WestCare halted new admissions during the facility’s shutdown.
The facility expects to resume admissions on Monday, Jenkins said.
Jenkins said, but he’s “extremely proud” of the way the agency handled the lockdown, including keeping clients’ treatment ongoing.
“I think it’s something that we addressed aggressively and rapidly, and now we are on the other side,” he said during the interview.
Jenkins said the facility had been following all the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as state and local guidelines before the outbreak. It is possible there had been recent transfers from other facilities before the outbreak, he said.
The Fresno County Department of Public Health helped with testing.
Program on same site stayed open
A Supported Overnight Stay program that provides mental health services, and is on the same site, remained opened while the facility was shut down, according to a worker, who asked to remain anonymous over fears of retaliation. The employee said they were encouraged not to discuss the facility’s quarantine in order to not cause patients in the overnight program to reconsider the service.
“This is very appalling for me and very inhuman especially during a pandemic to purposely expose clients to a dangerous environment,” the employee said, adding many clients in that program are homeless, have underlying health conditions, such as HIV, or are older.
Jenkins confirmed that program remained open while the facility was on lockdown. The program is “on the back of the building” and it has “its own entrance,” he said.
“They don’t interface at all,” he said.
WestCare initially only answered The Bee’s questions to the county, and a Fresno County official told The Bee the county couldn’t provide much information because of health information privacy laws.
“The Fresno County Department of Public Health (FCDPH) is actively engaged with state and local agencies to ensure safety protocols are being followed, and our team actively investigates any cases of COVID-19 in vulnerable populations,” Simranjit Dhillon wrote to the The Bee in an email.
.jpg)