One person has died after a massive COVID-19 outbreak of emergency room workers at a San Jose Kaiser Permanente facility in California. Kaiser said some of the staff had been vaccinated for the virus before the outbreak, but did not say whether the person who died had received the vaccine.
While hospital officials pointed to a blow-up costume worn by someone who appeared briefly in the emergency room on Christmas Day as a possible source for the contamination, one employee said the hospital was also administering respiratory treatments that same day in a room not approved for that procedure.
All 44 infected persons worked in the ER that day. The person who died, a registration clerk, passed away nine days later.
The hospital also told news media they were deep cleaning the department, but the same unidentified employee said “that’s a lie.” As to the vaccine, the hospital issued a statement saying that even though some of the workers had received their first dose, “they would not have been expected to reach immunity when the exposure occurred.”
SOURCE: NBC Bay Area January 4, 2020