Here’s the list of California nursing homes with COVID-19 among residents and employees

More than 1,740 nursing home residents and 1,290 employees in California have tested positive for COVID-19, with outbreaks clustered in several major cities and cases confirmed in nearly two-dozen counties, new state data shows.

For the first time, the California Department of Public Health on Friday night published the names of each skilled nursing home with a resident or employee who has tested positive for the disease. Across the country, nursing homes have been devastated with thousands of deaths from the new coronavirus pandemic.

The list of names and cases, which the state said it would regularly update, comes after California faced pressure from health care experts who said detailed information was critical to pinpoint how COVID-19 had spread through vulnerable elder-care facilities. Until Friday, the state had only once released broad statewide numbers.

In total, 261 of the state’s 1,224 skilled nursing facilities in California — 21 percent — have so far reported COVID-19 cases among either a resident or health care worker, the state said.

Confirmed cases among nursing home staff and residents were reported to the state in at least 21 counties, including a wave that infected 19 residents in a San Diego County facility and a 55-person outbreak in Yolo County at a facility in Woodland.

At least 148 skilled nursing homes in Los Angeles County have confirmed COVID-19 cases in residents or staff, representing more than half of the reported facilities with cases in California. Elsewhere in Southern California, 19 facilities in Riverside County, 14 in San Bernardino and 11 in San Diego County also had confirmed cases.

Santa Clara County also reported 11 facilities, the most among Bay Area jurisdictions. There were 10 facilities reported in Alameda County and six in San Francisco.

One facility in Tulare County, the Redwood Springs Healthcare Center in Visalia, reported 91 residents and 46 employees who had positive — the largest outbreak in the state among residents. The Brier Oak on Sunset skilled nursing center in Los Angeles reported 80 residents and 62 employees had been infected, the highest total number in California.

“I just cannot impress upon folks more, this knows no geography,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday afternoon. “It knows certainly no party. It knows no region. This is impacting all of us across the state.”

In Sacramento County, three facilities have reported at least one positive case among residents: Casa Coloma Health Care Center, Manorcare Health Services-Citrus Heights and Windsor El Camino Care Center.

Three others reported positive cases among employees: Eskaton Care Center Manzanita, Midtown Oaks Post-Acute and ACC Care Center.

Search the full list below.

The state’s information is based on point-in-time reports from the 86 percent of facilities that shared data on Thursday or Friday, officials said. It does not include exact numbers if there are 10 or fewer confirmed infections in a facility. It also omits information on COVID-19 deaths linked to the facilities, and does not factor in other types of long-term care facilities such as assisted living homes.

Several large counties, including Fresno and Kern, are not shown on the state’s list — those two counties would not provide basic details about infections earlier in the week when contacted by The Sacramento Bee, either.

The number of confirmed cases more than doubled since Newsom in a news conference last week said at least 1,266 nursing home residents and staff had tested positive. That was in addition to 370 people living and working in other types of assisted-living facilities.

Until Friday, that was the only time the state had provided information about the number of COVID-19 infections in long-term care facilities.

In a statement Saturday, the California Association of Health Facilities noted that 80 percent of nursing homes in California “are COVID-19 free.” They credited nursing home workers “who isolated patients from visitors early on, ramped up infection prevention protocols and refused to take COVID positive patients from the hospital.”

“We hope this information will help the state determine locations where the need is greatest and take action,” they said. “The focus should be on the delivery of personal protective equipment to these facilities as well as prioritized testing of skilled nursing workers to prevent further spread.”

Health experts wanted more details

The release of long-term care facility data came after The Bee reported Friday morning that one-third of the California counties had at least one case of COVID-19 in a long-term care facility.

Even six weeks after Newsom declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus and California recorded its first death attributed to the disease, officials would not share information about cases in long-term care facilities and repeatedly deferred to counties to release such information.

The Bee contacted each of the 58 county health departments to ask for basic details about the number of cases in such facilities and how many people in the county who died had connections to them. Responses from 50 counties provided the most complete picture of how the coronavirus pandemic spread through long-term care facilities in California.

The responses also revealed a lack of widespread and systematic testing for the disease inside facilities, inconsistent case reporting and, in some cases, an outright refusal to share basic information at all.

Where one California county publishes the number of facilities with infections, another publishes the facility names. And where one lacks details about testing inside nursing homes, another outright denies access to aggregated information about confirmed cases.

Experts said those types of inconsistencies have stymied a broader understanding of the spread of the new coronavirus inside facilities that care for California’s most vulnerable residents.

“If we are going to make the case that we need more nursing home resources, we need to know the extent of the problem,” said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. “How do we learn best practices from a public health perspective if we don’t even know which facilities have cases?”

News organizations that have tracked the pandemic’s toll in nursing homes have increasingly found a grim picture. USA TODAY surveyed state health departments and found at least 2,300 long-term care facilities in 37 states have reported positive cases.

And on Friday, The New York Times reported at least 6,900 people living in or connected to nursing homes had died because of COVID-19 complications, far higher than previously known.

“They’re death pits,” said Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, told the Times. “These nursing homes are already overwhelmed. They’re crowded and they’re understaffed. One Covid-positive patient in a nursing home produces carnage.”