Covid-19 Nursing Homes Neglect

My mom’s mental and physical health has deteriorated enormously in the last four months of the forced lockdown in her nursing home. They were kept isolated and bed-ridden without the benefit of any exercise or even wheelchair self-strolling.

The staff lost her dentures for the seventh time in four years and a trip to the dentist did not help as her jaw muscles were too weak to bite down to make imprints for new dentures.  Leg muscles, and most muscles in general have atrophied from lack of movement.

By order of the Virginia Health Department, they shuffled the elderly from the rooms they knew into unknown rooms previously occupied by other patients sick with the flu.

The entire move was done in one day, hardly enough time to sterilize the rooms properly. They hurriedly threw some of their belongings in plastic bags and put them on the floor in the new rooms with a roommate.

The single occupancy rooms were dedicated to Covid-19 patients’ isolation. Of the 101 residents, 76 tested positive for Covid-19 and 26 did not. Most who tested positive were asymptomatic.

Mom was tested twice for Covid-19 and came up negative both times. But she got pneumonia from the flu even though she had a mandatory flu shot. Thankfully, she recovered, her second bout with pneumonia in three years.

Eventually eight people died of underlying multiple illnesses but were marked as Covid-19. One man was 100 years old. In the best of times, caretakes and underpaid careless facility cleaners carry bacteria and viruses from room to room.

Recently, the nursing home resumed admission of new patients, but former residents are still in lockdown and families are not allowed to see them.

Among the many sad lessons, I learned from this flu epidemic called a “pandemic,” was how poorly and inhumanely the elderly were treated in nursing homes.

Jon Rappaport called the Covid-19 the “nursing home disaster.” He wrote that it was “mass murder by cruelty,” and by painful physical isolation, lack of mental stimulation, and loneliness. He added that “The excess mortality of 2020 is largely the result of elderly people dying in nursing homes.”

He explained, “it has nothing to do with a virus, it has to do with patients who are already on a long downward health slide---then hit with the terror of an arbitrary and fake Covid-19 diagnosis, and then isolated and shut off from family and friends---in facilities where gross neglect and indifference are all too often the ‘standard of care.’”

I can certainly attest to the neglect and slowly delivered care despite my weekly insistence. Under the best of times, mom was neglected. Now I cannot have access to her at all, I have no idea of her level of care. There are some good nurses who care about their patients but most of them do not stay long, replaced by foreign caretakers who do not relate to our standards of medicine.

It is easy to overcome nursing home patients with terror and isolation. When I asked to take mom outside for a stroll for fresh air and sunshine, even wearing gloves and a mask, I was told that she would have to be put in isolation for 14 days if I did that. But if she would go out into the world for a doctor’s visit, that would be approved.

And the elderly locked down at home, scared to death by the non-stop media COVID-19 panic, died alone and isolated, afraid to call 911 for help. Those who did go to the hospital, were intubated immediately with breathing ventilators, heavily sedated with several drugs, never came out of sedation to breathe on their own again and died.

Forbes reported on May 22, that in 43 states, “42% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.” The excess mortality allegedly came from nursing homes and the use of ventilators in hospitals. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths/#46e33a6074cd

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at charts of 5,700 patients with Coronavirus infections who were hospitalized in 12 hospitals in New York City and the patients’ outcome based on age, sex, and co-morbidities. The mortality rate on ventilators was 88.1 percent.  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32320003/