As people fight
each other in stores, public places, streets, and parks over the governments’ unconstitutional
mandate for healthy people to wear masks in stifling heat, indoors, outdoors,
in their own cars alone, or start fights with perfect strangers they insult for
their selfishness that endangers their fragile health and existence in the air
space they breathe, how dare they pollute the air that may kill them with a
deadly virus, and snitch on perfect strangers on websites and to employers
because their employees dare to wear the mask improperly below their noses or
took it off to answer the phone in order to be heard by the other party on the
line, a large group of a different kind of Covid-19 victims is being ignored –
people in nursing homes.
The elderly in
nursing homes have health issues that are not being properly addressed. Some
die alone and are buried hurriedly without any loved ones present. Some residents
are Covid-negative, some are Covid-positive asymptomatic, and some have long recovered
from their bout with pneumonia.
Residents
are locked up away from their relatives and friends, unable to go to the specialists
they need, unable to even get out to the parking lot in their wheelchairs to
get fresh air and sunshine. Upon return from such a potential trip, they would
have to be isolated for 14 days.
These
forgotten Americans are denied trips to the barber or the beauty salon. They cannot go out to have a meal with their
families in a restaurant, they must stay locked up indefinitely.
Some
residents have incipient dementia and do understand and feel more deeply the non-ending
isolation and abandonment. Others have a more severe form of dementia and do
not understand what is going on, why they cannot open the windows or why they
cannot come out of their rooms anymore, why they cannot wheel themselves on the
corridors to visit with other residents, to have more human contact than just the
nurse on duty or the CNA taking care of them for that week.
Families
kept at bay can only imagine the fear and frustration of their loved ones who
believe that they have been abandoned for good, never seeing a familiar and
loved face in months.
Residents
are not allowed any activities, no church services, no stimulation from human
contact, no visitors reading to them, talking to them, or praying with them. Phone
calls are seldom answered. The nurses and other caretakers are too busy, afraid
to go to work, and overwhelmed, we were told.
The nursing
home administrator blames the mighty Health Department who oversees the fate of
the nursing home residents. The home is blameless and there is only so much
they can do to keep the loved ones comfortable. I cannot imagine how
comfortable a resident is who has been in lockdown since mid-March to the point
that they cannot leave their rooms and all doors must be shut.
Virginia’s
first district, Rep. Rob Wittman, assured families that the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have announced new initiatives “designed
to protect nursing home residents from coronavirus.” He and Rep. Abigail
Spanberger (VA-07) have asked the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
to “provide increased emergency funding to all long-term care facilities, in
addition to the nearly $4.9 billion distribution to nursing home facilities impacted
by Covid-19 which he supported.”
HHS authorized
$5 billion relief fund to “Medicare-certified long-term care facilities and
state veterans’ homes, to build nursing home skills and enhance response to
COVID-19, including enhanced infection control.”
CMS will now
require, not just recommend, that “all nursing homes in states with a 5%
positivity rate or greater test all nursing home staff each week, identifying
asymptomatic carriers. More than 15,000 testing devices will be deployed over
the next few months to help support this mandate.”
The Trump
administration “deployed federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite
technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks in
an effort to reduce transmission and the risk of Covid-19 spread among
residents.” The teams are composed of “clinicians and public health personnel
from CMS, CDC, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health.”
Since the
residents are locked up in their rooms and families are not allowed in, it is
obvious that the spread occurs from the staff and caretakers in the nursing
homes.
Since May
2020, CMS and CDC have collected weekly data on each nursing home and numbers
of Covid-19 cases. The compiled data reached the White House and CMS will send to
states a list of nursing homes with an increase in cases each week, thus
outlining the highest risk nursing homes. https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/trump-administration-announces-new-resources-protect-nursing-home-residents-against-covid-19
In the
meantime, while you are hysterically afraid to go to work in your cushy
government office, your classroom composed of low risk students, are afraid to
eat in a restaurant, or are afraid to come anywhere near another human being
before having an irrational meltdown, think about the nursing home residents
who have not left their locked-down rooms and buildings since mid-March and
their families have not seen them.
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