Reporting on incompetent care and abusive treatment of the elderly in nursing homes was always necessary but more so during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
During the three years of the pandemic (March 14, 2020 -June 9, 2022) while my mother was in the Manor Care Nursing facility in Fairfax, Virginia, I have seen and reported abuses and neglect to the nursing administrator and to the Virginia Ombudsman.
I had my mom’s best interest at heart and the interest of all the other
patients locked up 24/7 away from the world and their loved ones who wished to
visit them.
Visitors
were not allowed, only staff members, yet the patients kept getting sick with
Covid and some had died despite vaccinations.
The first
attempt of the nursing home to give families a glimpse of their locked-up loved
ones consisted of masked patients lined up on the sidewalk in their respective
wheelchairs, while their families drove around in a circle to wave at them and
say hello.
Someone had
made a large sign praising the working staff for their “heroism.” I personally have
quite a different view and definition of “heroism” and it does not involve
medical staff that knowingly forced a harmful injection on innocent elderly patients
who did not understand what was being done to them and were not allowed to give
consent. And most families contacted were just as ignorant when they did give
consent.
After weeks
of continued lockdown, I negotiated 10 minutes a week of Facetime with my
mom. It did not work too well, since she had dementia, she thought I was
someone on TV and her attention wondered.
Next the
administrator allowed me to speak to my mom through the thick window in the
lobby. She made 15-minute appointments per week, my mom was brought in the
lobby, she sat in her wheelchair on the other side of the glass and I stood
outside in the blazing sun or in the snow, depending on the season. We talked
through smart phones because the sound did not carry well through the glass.
Finally, after
much negotiating and mild threatening on my part, the administrator allowed my
mom to be brought outside on the patio for 30 minutes in the sunshine and fresh
air, but I had to keep my six feet distance with a mask on and mom had to be
masked as well. When the weather turned cold, I was allowed with her in the
conference room in the lobby, both masked up.
When Manor Care eventually
opened up patients' rooms to visits, the squalor and filth I found shocked me. All
her possessions and clothes were piled up in a corner of the room.
When the
owners had descended on the nursing home at the first lockdown, they had
hurriedly moved all patients in one day, two by two, sick ones together and
healthy ones together.
They hastily and carelessly removed everyone’s personal possessions and threw them in a corner on the floor. The move became a huge and unnecessary infectious wave as the rooms previously occupied by sick patients now infected the healthy ones moved into sickly rooms improperly sanitized and sterilized.
They did not care,
they just wanted the optics, to appear that they were doing something helpful. So,
mom was moved into such a room previously occupied by her friend Maria who was
terribly sick at that moment with Covid, and I knew it.
When I was
finally allowed in mom’s room, I spent endless hours cleaning it, disposing of
trash, putting all her clothes in proper order, discarding the shards of broken
glass and plastic possessions, and making sure everything was properly
laundered. Most of her valuable possessions were gone.
Was she
properly fed? Based on the amount of weight she lost during the lockdown, they
must’ve just put the plate in front of her but dementia patients forget to eat,
they have to be fed. Was she given enough water? Did she remember to drink the
large glass per day she received?
Mom survived
the Covid only to be killed by uncaring CNAs and nurses who did not give her
life saving antibiotics for an ordinary UTI which turned septic. I learned that
lives in a nursing home are not valued much by the staff. And the more a family
member held them to account, the worse they treated their loved ones left
behind after the family visit ended.
Was it a
good idea to isolate the elderly to such a degree that in some places families
could not even attend their funerals? Was it ethical to mistreat dementia patients
because they did not like being held to task by family? Of course not, but it
happened to my mom.
Joseph
Hickey and Dennis G. Rancourt looked at policies typically addressing “vulnerable
individuals concentrated in centralized care facilities and entail limiting
social contacts with visitors, staff members, and other care home residents” in
a recent study published on October 30, 2023, titled, Predictions from standard
epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people
into care facilities.
“Across a large range of possible
model parameters including degrees of segregation versus intermingling of
vulnerable and robust individuals, we find that concentrating the most
vulnerable into centralized care facilities virtually always increases the infectious
disease attack rate in the vulnerable group, without significant benefit to the
robust group.” Predictions
from standard epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and
isolating vulnerable people into care facilities | PLOS ONE
Common sense dictates that such
isolation is not good for human beings for many reasons, including the lack of
fresh air, sunshine, limited human contact, lack of proper care and nutrition
in the absence of inspection, and a filthy environment in their isolated rooms
where cleaning and sanitation were seldom done, citing a reduced staff.
Hickey and Rancourt’s study concluded
that “isolated care homes of vulnerable residents are predicted to be the worse
possible mixing circumstances for reducing harm in epidemic or pandemic
conditions.”
At the end of the day, I knew that
there was no science behind the Covid lockdowns, we were being used in a huge
and failed experiment. And President Trump gave Drs. Fauci and Brix an endless
platform to terrorize the population into compliance. The only silver lining
was that the authoritarian government had not welded shut apartment complex
doors like they did in China. Yet we were forced to wear masks outdoors in
large state parks with no other humans in sight. As someone aptly wrote, "we were guinea pigs in a failed experiment."
Just hit the blue "share" button and shared on Facebook & Twitter / X. My aunt unfortunately became ill (no dementia) during COVID lockdown and caught it in a rehab facility. She survived as did her brother and older sister *my mom) before shots were available. After shots were available, my aunt got them as they transfered her to a nursing facility. She caught COVID after getting the shots. Recovered. Then died not too long afterward, "heart event". She had many problems, but, with medications and care she lived on her own, drove, etc. It was sad to not be able to see her. She did get to have a funeral, as the funeral homes reopened by then. There's a lot more, but too much to type up here.
ReplyDeleteRead this: https://www.kcur.org/health/2020-05-27/at-least-8-lawsuits-are-now-pending-against-kansas-city-kansas-rehab-facility-over-covid-19-deaths
ReplyDeleteThe early days of the lovkdown: https://www.kshb.com/news/coronavirus/positive-cases-deaths-at-riverbend-nursing-home-growing-emails-show-situation-worsens-by-the-day
ReplyDeleteThis was so tragic! A nightmare!
ReplyDeleteIt was tragic!
Delete