SAN JOSE – The coronavirus outbreak on Christmas Day at Kaiser Permanente San Jose continued to spread on Tuesday – and hospital staff are not the only ones to get sick.
For the first time, 15 patients on Tuesday were added to the growing list of infected people after an employee wandering through the emergency department in an inflatable tree costume on December 25 may have been a super spreader, the Health Department said. Santa Clara County Public Library.
COVID-19 positive case counts also skyrocketed among Kaiser employees to 77 on Tuesday, down from 60 last week, the county said. A clerk, a receptionist, died about a week after Christmas, although Kaiser did not say exactly when.
When it came to the new figures released on Tuesday, Kaiser Permanente said only that “we are trying to validate the numbers provided by the county”.
The news came after the county fined Kaiser $ 43,000 last week for not immediately notifying authorities of the 43 original cases it made public more than a week later – charging a $ 1,000 fine for each case.
Several agencies are investigating the outbreak, including the state Department of Public Health, Cal / OSHA and Santa Clara County. In a press release in early January, Kaiser suggested that a well-meaning employee spreading joy over the holiday may have been the source. The woman in costume had no symptoms at the time, but the test was positive shortly after.
Coronavirus experts say it is possible that the person with the suit may have been an unconscious super spreader – most people are more infectious before showing symptoms and the ventilator with the inflatable suit could easily have ventilated and spread the virus.
But with hospital staff forced to wear masks and some workers who started their shifts at the end of the day also becoming ill, many questions remain about whether there could have been another source of the outbreak.
A patient who spoke to this news agency said she was discharged from the ER on December 24, the day before the woman in costume appeared. But she also tested positive for the virus and is convinced she was infected at Kaiser.