The county confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 at Frontier with the company’s approval, Cianci-Chapman said.

“We’re partnering with the nursing home in dealing with this outbreak, and so any information I’ve given to the media I’ve done with their blessing,” he said. “If they feel that I was revealing information that I was uncomfortable with or that they weren’t prepared to respond to the media themselves it could damage the relationship and could damage the mitigation response.”

The health department would normally only release the age and gender of a person who died of COVID-19 and whether they were hospitalized, but decided it could name Frontier because of public interest in COVID-19’s impact at facilities housing older adults, Cianci-Chapman said.

“We had decided early on in the outbreak that we would be very limited in the amount of information we released just to protect the privacy of the family,” he said. “But because we have a relationship with the nursing home, and we know that there is a great deal of public interest in the deaths that occur at a nursing home, after speaking with nursing homes, we feel like we can expand on what our established policy was.”