Chef at ALF ‘died a Hero on the frontlines.’ Miami Springs nursing home now has most deaths

Laudelina Ochoa’s family wants the world to know she was more than just a COVID-19 statistic about elder-care deaths in Florida.

Ochoa left her native Cuban city of Holguin about 14 years ago to build a new life for her family in Miami. She was the popular head chef at The Pointe on Southwest Eighth Street, an assisted living facility where she was known as much for her smile as for her recipes.

But this past week the joyful 59-year-old, born on New Year’s Eve, joined the long list of at least 1,043 elder-care residents and staffers whose lives have been ended by the pandemic.

“She was so strong. We never thought it was going to this route,” said Adrian Bardet Ochoa, her 25-year-old son. As a nursing student he was allowed to don protective gear and hold her hand as she passed after more than a week of intubation.

Assisted living facilities, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have been the biggest drivers of COVID-19 deaths in Florida as much of the state begins to reopen. In the past two weeks, residents and staff of long-term care facilities have accounted for three out of four COVID-19 deaths in the state.

The data show only nine deaths among workers — not including Ochoa, whose death will take a few days to be logged by the state. State records currently show no staff deaths at The Pointe.

While Ochoa was not a frontline caregiver per se, her death underscores how dangerous nursing homes and assisted living facilities are for anyone who lives or works there or visits. Her son said she told him a laundry worker at The Pointe, a woman, had also contracted the coronavirus.

In the latest tally of deaths at nursing homes and ALFs, released Friday night, the Fair Havens Center nursing home in Miami Springs has, for the first time, more deaths than any other home. So far, 28 residents have died at Fair Havens from coronavirus, with 20 of those deaths in the past two weeks. The home is subject to an emergency moratorium on new residents because of ineffective COVID-19 monitoring and isolation practices that Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration said created a “fertile ground for the virus to spread.”

Long-term care facilities in South Florida had accounted for 496 deaths effective Friday, just under half of all COVID-19 deaths.

The Seminole Pavilion Rehabilitation and Nursing Services nursing home in Seminole has had the second most overall deaths in the state, with 24 residents and one staff member succumbing to COVID-19.

The Community Convalescent Center, a nursing home in Plant City, reported the biggest increase in reported deaths in the past week, with 12 additional residents reported, bringing the total number of deaths at the facility to 18.

‘It can spread like wildfire’

Data on testing at long-term facilities released by the state only under legal pressure by the Miami Herald and other media organizations, showed that the state has ramped up its testing recently, though Gov. Ron DeSantis has resisted recommendations from the White House to make testing of all facilities mandatory.

The data, which is through Monday, showed that the state conducted tests at 135 facilities in the prior week, one-third of the 382 facilities it had tested up to that juncture. The data showed that 2 percent of all staff and residents tested positive in that time period.

As the state continues to accelerate testing, the results from the past five days appear to show 2.8% of those tested are positive, primarily in long-term care facilities or prisons and not among younger people, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday.

“So we’re really, really getting a lot of negative results, and the positive results tend to be in long-term care facilities,’‘ he said at a news conference in Jacksonville.

DeSantis added that the results of some tests have surprised him.

“There’s a number of seniors that [test positive but] aren’t symptomatic,” he said. “You would think that as soon as they got it they’d be in the ICU, but that’s fortunately not the case.”

Despite DeSantis’ professing surprise Friday, the issue of asymptomatic nursing home residents arose during the governor’s visit to the White House on April 28, when White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Deborah Birx promoted testing of asymptomatic nursing home residents.

DeSantis expressed concern then about the impact asymptomatic residents could have on the spread of the virus at nursing homes.

“Well, especially with the asymptomatic — in a nursing home situation, if that starts getting out, man, that is a perfect environment for this virus to just start spreading,” DeSantis said. “I mean, it can spread like wildfire very quickly.”

Details in the Florida records on statewide COVID-19 deaths, which are being released at regular intervals under the threat of another lawsuit from the Herald and media organizations, show numerous examples of asymptomatic residents testing positive in elder-care facilities.

“The decedent was a resident at a local assisted living facility, Riviera Palms, and tested positive for COVID-10 after several other residents and healthcare staff tested positive,” read an entry about the death of a 76-year-old woman who died April 15 in Manatee County and was “asymptomatic for COVID symptoms.”

Ochoa, the chef from The Pointe was asymptomatic as well, and her story is a grim reminder of how the coronavirus spreads silently. About three weeks before she died, she felt nauseous and went outside to applaud first responders and caregivers as had become custom across parts of the nation. There was a light rain and she skipped going to a second job she worked.

Workers like Ochoa don’t earn big salaries. The average salary for a registered nurse at a Florida nursing home is about $59,000, according to the website salary.com, but certified nursing assistants in the same facilities average about $25,552 annually, according to the website, which aggregates market pay data reported by human resources departments and from compensation surveys.

About a week later she tested positive for COVID-19, and Bardet and his sister began caring for her at the West Miami home they all share. His sister then contracted coronavirus and Bardet began caring for both, in a home where Ochoa’s two grandsons also live.

COVID-19 Cases in Florida

As Ochoa’s condition worsened, he took her to the hospital and on March 12 she was intubated, passing away eight days later despite no history of underlying health problems.

Her Facebook page, now a tribute, shows photos of her past in Cuba and her pride in her Cuban heritage.

“I told my mom, ‘You are a hero and brave for working and going in the front doors every day of work,’” Bardet, Ochoa’s son, wrote. “My mom never considered herself a hero she just said, ‘We are going to get through this.’ Well, I consider my mom a Hero and she died a Hero on the frontlines.”