FREMONT — A skilled nursing facility in Fremont has racked up nearly $60,000 in penalties from the state for not properly protecting its workers from COVID-19 during the pandemic.
California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, often referred to as Cal/OSHA, issued five citations to Fremont Healthcare Center, located off Mowry Avenue at 39022 Presidio Way, four of which were categorized as “serious,” and one categorized as “regulatory.”
The center failed to “implement and maintain effective procedures to reduce the risk of transmission of aerosol transmissible diseases, specifically exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” the agency said in a statement Thursday.
The agency found proof of these violations during inspections that happened between June 30, 2020 and Jan. 13, 2021, according to state documents.
Fremont Healthcare Center also “failed to immediately report” to Cal/OSHA that one of its employees suffered a serious illness and was hospitalized with COVID-19 for about seven days in May.
The center also, in at least eight cases, didn’t do a proper analysis to determine which employees had significant exposure to COVID-19 cases, and failed to “notify employees with significant exposures in a reasonable timeframe,” the citations said.
Employees at the center were also not properly trained or given a general explanation of the virus, including its transmission, nor were they trained on the facility’s control measures and appropriate respiratory protection to prevent spread of the virus, among other violations.
A request for comment from Fremont Healthcare Center was not immediately returned Thursday afternoon.
In all, the Fremont center was fined $59,000, accounting for the largest penalty amount of four skilled nursing facilities in a recent batch of citations announced by Cal/OSHA, though other medical facilities, such as three Kaiser locations in the Bay Area, were issued a total of nearly $200,000 in penalties.
San Quentin State Prison was issued the single largest penalty amount, at $421,880, for its litany of failings to protect staff there.
Cal/OSHA said prison staff “were not provided adequate training or equipment for working with COVID-19 infected individuals, and employees who had been exposed to COVID-19 positive inmates were not provided proper medical services, including testing, contact tracing and referrals to physicians or other licensed health care professionals.”
A Cardenas Markets location in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood was penalized to the tune of nearly $31,000 for multiple violations including failing to put in place preventative safety measures such as requiring masks and distancing in the store. Cal/OSHA said it ran an inspection at the store after it learned from media coverage of an outbreak among employees last May.
