NJ Nursing Home With High COVID-Related Deaths Operating Under New Name

A New Jersey nursing home where 83 patients died of COVID-19 and 17 bodies were stacked in the tiny morgue has changed its name but is still owned and operated by the same people. 

Andover Subacute II is now called Woodland Behavioral and Nursing Center but is still in operation. Lewis Schwartz, one of the owners, was previously part of a nursing home chain called Skyline Healthcare. It collapsed in 2019 after being accused of financial mismanagement and neglect.

“The individuals that ran Skyline should not ever be in charge of a nursing home again, and yet here we are,” David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, said. “Different names, same practices.”

Trouble started for Andover long before the pandemic began. In 2019, an elderly woman with dementia left the facility through two broken automatic doors. She was found sitting in the snow at 4:30 a.m. with severe frostbite, and her family sued. That lawsuit is still pending. 

During the pandemic, roughly one in six residents died of COVID in the first four months. That equates to 83 patients out of 539. A former maintenance worker, Preston Nicolai, told NBC News that they were shuffling patients around without knowing who was positive for the virus and who wasn’t. There was no testing conducted at the facility.

“I do believe it helped spread the cases of COVID throughout the building,” he told the outlet.

Nicolai described arriving at work on Easter last year and finding a woman’s body in the outdoor maintenance shed. The morgue was overwhelmed with bodies, and there was no more room. He brought the woman’s body back inside the nursing home.

An inspection from around the same time revealed residents were not being fed, some had open wounds, there was no infection control, and deaths of residents and staff were not being reported to public health officials.

The nursing home remains part of an ongoing investigation into “facilities with high numbers of Covid-related deaths and below-average track records for health inspections, staffing, and quality of care.” Family members of some of the residents who passed away filed a class-action lawsuit, which is moving through the state court system.