Bad State Decisions about Nursing Homes Are Heavily Driving the Coronavirus Outbreak
By Jim Geraghty
May 8, 2020
Coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes have been particularly deadly in California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.
You could make a strong argument that the country’s deadly coronavirus problem is largely a nursing home problem, dangerous everywhere but far more prevalent in a half-dozen or so of the country’s more heavily and densely populated states. What’s more, many of these states enacted coronavirus response policies that likely put nursing and assisted-living home residents at higher risk for infection.Coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes have been particularly deadly in California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.
You could make a strong argument that the country’s deadly coronavirus problem is largely a nursing home problem, dangerous everywhere but far more prevalent in a half-dozen or so of the country’s more heavily and densely populated states. What’s more, many of these states enacted coronavirus response policies that likely put nursing and assisted-living home residents at higher risk for infection.
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Notice the New York state policy described by the New York Post:
The new Health Department info released late Monday adds 1,700 presumed coronavirus deaths to the grim total, suggesting that COVID-19 complications have killed 4,813 residents of nursing homes and adult-care facilities — and that doesn’t include those who died in hospitals.
Cuomo downplayed the count Tuesday: “I would take all of these numbers now with a grain of salt,” since “what does a ‘presumed death’ mean, right?”
So why on earth did his health commissioner, Howard Zucker, force nursing homes to take in virus-positive patients starting March 25?
The Post contrasted New York’s policies with those of Florida:
No Sunshine State patient can be discharged from a hospital into a nursing home without a negative test result. Florida hospitals had already refused to send coronavirus-positive patients back; the new rule means even those who show no symptoms must be tested and confirmed negative.
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A defensive Cuomo on Tuesday claimed the state had done “everything you can” to keep the coronavirus from spreading among New York’s seniors. But that’s just not true.
Right now, a lot of people really want to believe that as bad as the coronavirus outbreak is, the consequences have been mitigated by good decisions made by governors like Gavin Newsom, J. D. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Tom Wolf, Phil Murphy, and Andrew Cuomo. But those governors, whatever their other strengths, all presided over state governments that served their nursing homes and assisted living facilities poorly — either through an inability to provide protective equipment (Illinois), insufficient attention (Pennsylvania), or by sending recovering but still contagious patients back into buildings with lots of other vulnerable elderly (California, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York).
The national media have paid copious amounts of attention to the risk of spreading the coronavirus in places like the beaches of Florida and the reopening of businesses in Georgia. A refocus of the national media’s attention and criticism upon the nursing homes in states like California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York is long overdue. A lot of people have relished accusing the anti-lockdown protesters of “killing grandma.” It is time we took a more serious look at what lawmakers’ decisions led most directly to the deaths of so many grandmothers and grandfathers.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/b ... term=first
The article does give some detail about some of the states problems and what happened. Read it if you want.
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