By Jason Pohl
In early March — before the Great Pause and when we still worked in actual newsrooms — I went to my editor with a story idea: What are California’s most problematic nursing homes doing to prepare for the coronavirus pandemic?
The idea was straightforward; the kind of story reporters often write. Inspection documents and spreadsheets are available online, and the codebook for violations is relatively easy to decipher. After a few days of analysis, a dive through our newspaper archives for past nursing home coverage and calls to facilities with the worst infection-related marks, the story practically wrote itself. It turned out that a facility in our own backyard had the dubious distinction as one of the lowest-ranked in California when it came to stopping the spread of infections.
We published that story and database on March 13.
I didn’t know it then, but this would be the beginning of a six-month reporting project that would help reveal the professional and personal toll that frontline nursing home employees have endured during the pandemic.
After the first story was published, I received a middle-of-the-night email from an executive at the company that operates Saint Claire’s, the facility I featured. I braced for criticism. It never came.
Instead, the new operator apologized for nobody responding to my questions before the story ran. He acknowledged the facility’s troubled past and said they planned to overhaul and rebrand the facility. To my surprise, he also invited me to keep in touch and even visit the facility and spend time with the staff.
That night was just days before California’s lockdowns began. With things moving fast, I largely tabled the email for a few weeks.
But as spring dragged on, it was becoming clear that getting the unvarnished truth about the challenges facing frontline workers was important but increasingly challenging. Skittish administrators and corporate owners often blocked employees from speaking with journalists.
So, at the end of April, I pulled up that email again and took them up on their offer. I said I wanted to tell the story of frontline nursing home workers whose stories had gone largely untold as reporters — including me — focused on hospital employees.
We set up a call, and I made it clear that I didn’t want the experiences filtered through corporate spin doctors. I wanted to hear directly from frontline staff.
To my surprise, they agreed.
The company allowed Dawn Calkins, Saint Clarie’s director of nursing, and Lina Young, the head housekeeper, to speak with me and share their stories. All I had to do was listen.
We spoke by phone or exchanged text messages every few days in May and June. They told me about their concerns as California rushed to reopen restaurants, bars and businesses. They told me about their worries over holiday weekend get-togethers and potential superspreader events like the protests over police brutality. And they shared details of how months of COVID-19 precautions inside Saint Claire’s was taking a toll on their lives at home.
By August, with hours of interview transcripts, I finally started writing. Saint Clarie’s, so far, was a success story. Only one part-time employee had tested positive for COVID-19. After months of writing somber stories, here was a bright spot, it seemed. Calkins and Young had succeeded at keeping the virus at bay, and they were about to give readers a glimmer of hope.
All good things end, though.
About a week before we were set to publish the story, Saint Claire’s reported a handful of positive cases, either among patients who had gone to the hospital or employees who worked in the building. We hit pause, and I worked to learn more about what was happening inside.
Calkins’ nervous text message emojis and silence otherwise told part of the story. The rocketing case counts on California’s nursing home tracking website told the rest. The virus spreading in the south Sacramento community had found its way into Saint Claire’s.
I didn’t have any in-depth conversations with Calkins or Young for weeks. The administrator wouldn’t return my emails. I felt ghosted and started to wonder if all those months talking to the people inside was for naught.
Finally, in mid-October, the silence broke. Calkins agreed to meet in person at her home and tell the rest of the story. She held back tears as she recalled sleeping in a hotel room while working 15-hour days on the floor, picking up overnight shifts and eventually testing positive herself. She suspected she had spread it to her 8-year-old son, who soon after complained that his bones hurt. The day before she was to return after her time in isolation, her boss told her not to come back. She told me the saddest part was leaving behind the nursing team she had worked to build.
After all that time talking, that interview was the first time we had met in person. So it goes in a pandemic.
I rewrote much of the story in the following days. It was clear when we finally published at the end of October that this was a different kind of nursing home pandemic story. It tied together so much of what has happened with confusing state regulation, unease among residents and staff and fear from everyone in between.
Like so many great longer-term stories, this one stemmed from a quick-hit piece of reporting. It was the luxury of time to report it out, the graciousness of great sources and a bit of luck that made it all stand out a bit more in these incredibly strange and difficult times.
Jason Pohl is an investigative reporter at The Sacramento Bee. He has previously reported for newspapers in Colorado and Arizona and joined The Bee in 2019 as part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, where he spent the year investigating county jail oversight and mental health care. His primary beats are government accountability and criminal justice.
