The Nursing Home Lockdowns Debacle

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."