The Tragedy Of ‘St Joe’s’
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For the 78 residents of St. Joe’s, the arrival of hazmat-suited officials in their caravan of ambulance buses was terrifying. Some evacuees with dementia shouted and furiously clawed at them. Others begged not to be taken away.
Seth Wenig/AP
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Seth Wenig/AP
Annette Kociolek, in a photograph from last year, was a fireball who loved broaches, beads, barrettes and living at St. Joe’s. «The nuns spoke Polish to her, her daughter said.
Dorothy Cassaro
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Dorothy Cassaro
The reporting makes clear that the state failed to sufficiently take into account the fragility of the evacuees, possible alternatives to the move, and how complicated it would be to transfer 78 older adults to a facility 45 minutes away. The consequences of the decision are stark: nearly half the people loaded on the ambulance buses that morning died a short time later, some within days. Experts on aging say the stress of the evacuation was undoubtedly a contributing factor.
According to people close to St. Joe’s and families who were monitoring the facility at the time, when the evacuation order came, the nuns who ran St. Joe’s were not presiding over an uncontrollable outbreak.
NPR saw contemporaneous emails that indicated that fewer than a dozen of the residents had confirmed positive for the virus shortly before the state decided to evacuate. The New Jersey Department of Health, through a spokesperson, claimed there were twice that many.
In a written statement, the department said residents in the facility were showing signs of illness, but they stopped short of saying they had tested positive for the virus. «The impact of COVID-19 on St. Joseph’s was severe, a spokesperson wrote.
It appears that the real problem at St. Joe’s was not so much a coronavirus outbreak among residents as it was an acute shortage of staff — something at least half the states in the U.S. are struggling with now in this latest winter surge.
Nurses, certified nursing assistants, and caregivers at St. Joe’s who had contact with residents who had tested positive for COVID-19 had to be quarantined to make sure they wouldn’t contribute to the spread. Some of the facility’s outside staff — concerned they would catch the mysterious virus that few understood at the time — stopped showing up for work. So St. Joe’s needed help.
Before the coronavirus, a typical shift at St. Joe’s included some 50 people with direct access to the patients. In the days just before the evacuation, that number had fallen to about twenty.
That’s why the nuns at St. Joe’s started calling around for reinforcements. A DOH spokesperson said the agency spent two days looking for temporary staff for St. Joe’s. They sent over some people from New Jersey’s largest nursing home chain, CareOne. A handful of their nurses and managers covered three shifts.
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«When I try to imagine what that would have felt like, seeing people in hazmat suits, me being wheeled out of the place that I know is my home, said Angie Kociolek, Annette’s youngest daughter, «It had to be traumatic.
Janie Osborne for NPR
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Janie Osborne for NPR
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St. Joseph’s Senior Home is a four-star, 101-bed facility run by Little Servant Sisters to the Immaculate Conception, a Polish order established in the 1850s with the mission to «nurture the mind, body, and soul… by serving the residents with the same love as if serving Christ Himself.
Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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Sisters Dorothy Cassaro (left), Bernadette Sohler and Angie Kociolek with their mother, Annette, in happier times, in 2006.
Dorothy Cassaro
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Dorothy Cassaro
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Police cruisers are parked near the entrance of the Wanaque Center For Nursing And Rehabilitation, where New Jersey state Health Department confirmed cases of adenovirus on Oct. 23, 2018, in Haskell, N.J. Dozens fell ill from the outbreak and 11 died.
Julio Cortez/AP
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Julio Cortez/AP
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It took much of the day to load the residents of St. Joe’s into the caravan of ambulance buses. The lines of buses left all at once, with a police escort, and drove the group to CareOne Hanover in Whippany, N.J., 45 minutes away.
Seth Wenig/AP
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The Catholic healthcare and nursing home business in New Jersey is a small world, full of people who have worked together for decades. As a result, connections can mean everything.
Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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Residents from St. Joseph’s Senior Home, including Annette Kociolek, were moved to CareOne at Hanover (seen here) in Whippany, N.J., on March 25. Just five days later, Kociolek was dead.
Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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For the 78 residents of St. Joe’s, the arrival of emergency workers in hazmat suits felt like an alien abduction. It took all day to load the older adults into a caravan of buses and take them to another facility.
Seth Wenig/AP
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Dorothy Cassaro, Annette’s middle daughter, said up until the time of the evacuation her mother was still sitting up, watching TV, and was still verbal. She was sure her mother would seem weaker than she was to the people admitting her at CareOne.
Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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Dorothy Cassaro holds a photograph of her mother, Annette. «My mom died among strangers, she said.
Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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Angie Kociolek has been trying to get the State of New Jersey to change the way it records COVID-19 deaths at long-term care facilities. Right now, even though her mother died at CareOne, the state’s list suggests she died at St. Joe’s.
Janie Osborne for NPR
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The residents of St. Joe’s were moved back to the Little Servant Sisters in Woodbridge three weeks after the evacuation. According to the state’s tally of coronavirus outbreaks in long-term care facilities, St. Joe’s is doing well: just one resident and four staffers have tested positive for the virus.
Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
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The residents of St. Joe’s were moved back to the Little Servant Sisters in Woodbridge three weeks after the evacuation. According to the state’s tally of coronavirus outbreaks in long-term care facilities, St. Joe’s is doing well: just one resident and four staffers have tested positive for the virus.
Erica Seryhm Lee for NPR
Shortly after it took in the residents of St. Joe’s, CareOne was given a license agreement to provide more than 700 beds at five of its facilities to care for COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals, according to DOH.
According to an investigation by ProPublica published in August, in the early days of the pandemic CareOne would go on to have the highest rate of COVID-19-related deaths among large long-term care companies in New Jersey.
As for St. Joe’s? Three weeks after the evacuation, the state of New Jersey moved 38 surviving evacuees back. As of December 21st, records show that St. Joe’s had one resident and four staff testing positive for COVID-19.
Monika Evstatieva
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