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."

The Latest Curfew and Lockdowns

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.  – Karl Marx

As of October 22, 2021, the Romanian National Committee for Emergency Situations introduced a new 30 day “restriction” on its citizens via Decision 91: Ministerul Afacerilor Interne (gov.ro)

-          Night curfews between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Movement during this time is only allowed to fully vaccinated individuals or those who have recovered from Covid-19 in the past 180 days and present proof of vaccination or recovery

-          People who work during those times

-          Medical assistance that cannot be postponed

-          Scheduled travel by train or plane

-          Providing care to children or elderly (What about people in between those age groups?)

-          All venues, commercial or cultural must be closed 9 p.m. to 5 p.m.

-          Restaurants can only open at 50 percent capacity between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.

-          Pharmacies, gas stations, and delivery services are permitted to keep their regular schedule

-          Discos, clubs, and casinos must be closed

-          Any private events (weddings, baptisms, parties are prohibited; it does not matter if individuals arranged weddings or baptisms months in advance)

-          Churches can open but must observe Covid-19 safety rules

-          Masks are mandatory in public areas both indoors and outdoors

If people leave their homes during curfew hours, they must show to the patrolling police proof of movement purpose such as work I.D., a certificate from employer, valid train or plane ticket, or a movement declaration.

As of October 22, 2021, citizens must carry a European Union digital Covid-19 certificate or a Romanian-issued “Digital Green Certificate/Green Pass” to access many public venues and to participate in activities such as indoor or outdoor dining at restaurants, shopping malls access, museum entry, exhibitions entry, cultural sites visitations, non-essential stores, swimming pools, gyms, and other venues. The Green Pass is not required in food stores, pharmacies with direct access, or religious services.

This Green Pass is obtained if a person is vaccinated in Romania and by Romanian citizens and their foreign spouses who were vaccinated abroad or in Romania. U.S. citizens cannot obtain a Green Pass in Romania. Romanian authorities will accept a CDC vaccination card as proof upon entry in Romania to avoid quarantine, but venues within the country may not. The Romanian government has not issued an explicit policy on accepting vaccine documentation issued abroad.

Why the renewed quarantine? The daily coronavirus deaths and infections allegedly “overwhelmed the hospital system” and due to limited intensive care beds, patients must be put on a waiting list. An interesting question should be asked if the patients placed on the waiting list are treated in the meantime with life-saving drugs like Ivermectin, HCQ, Zithromax, vitamin D, and zinc?

India announced this week that the state of Uttar-Pradesh, with a population of 240 million, is now almost entirely Covid-free. Nobody mentions that a drug, Iverotaj 12 mg (Ivermectin tablets USP) has been used in conjunction with vaccines and other measures. Uttar Pradesh, India Announces State Is COVID-19 Free Proving the Effectiveness of IVERMECTIN – Wim's Blog (wordpress.com)

 

 

 

Forced Vaccines for Americans and None for Border Invaders

The Biden administration has created a massive human invasion and humanitarian crisis on the southern border of the United States, a continuation of the ill-devised, anti-American policies of the Obama administration.

The border and legal immigration laws are no longer respected by Democrat socialist politicians and freedoms of the American people are trampled increasingly each day. The economic policies are marching us from stagflation, a stagnant economy coupled with inflation, to galloping inflation. Politicians are infatuated with excessive spending and ad nauseam money printing, not backed by any goods and services, worthless paper, too much money chasing too few goods, and hurting the middle class.

While unvetted foreign invaders are allowed into the United States and some bussed into conservative small towns in the cover of darkness, with not so much as a Covid-19 swab test, Americans are being fired for not allowing the government and their employers to mandate forced vaccinations against their religious and health beliefs, students are disenrolled from schools, some doctors refuse medical care to non-vaccinated patients, and other medical professionals harass their patients into compliance and demand that they show a copy of their vaccination cards which they in turn must provide electronically to health departments in various states.

As I learned today, some pharmacies no longer fill prescriptions as their number one job, they vaccinate and vaccinate. My prescription today at CVS pharmacy in Montclair’s Target store was not filled after 36 hours. The pharmacist claimed that she needed another hour since she had to do twenty vaccines per hour, especially boosters – that is a vaccine every three minutes! She did not seem to care that I needed my prescription yesterday.

When did our medical system become so lousy, fast resembling the socialized medical care under communism? It all changed in March 2020 when a national emergency was declared, and we have been in perennial lockdowns and now forced vaccinations that do not seem to work very well and patients need endless boosters which is great economic news for pharmacies and manufacturers alike.

Nursing homes are keeping their patients under national emergency lockdowns again, a cruel move since there are zero cases of Covid-19 sickness in the Pro Medica nursing home where my mom is a patient. Additionally, the staff must wear masks and shields even though nobody is showing signs of illness.

Visitations are allowed through a glass wall in the tiny antechamber where people come and go all the time. One visitor at a time can sit in a chair and talk through a smart phone to their loved one who is in a wheelchair behind the glass wall of the lobby. Even hard-core prisoners have more rights than what this Pro Medica facility allows their permanent residents.

Freedoms are being squeezed each day and we silently accept the political and medical tyranny.

Pro Medica's Perennial Lockdowns

I got a phone call this morning from a young lady named Martina, reading a canned corporate script which made her sound like a recording, apologizing, and blaming a computer glitch for not contacting families whose loved ones are residents in the Pro Medica-owned nursing homes.

I picked up the phone and she was none too pleased when I interrupted her prepared and written speech with annoying but logical questions. This was the second call on behalf of the corporate office in Colorado since the lockdowns started on March 14, 2020.

She informed me that last week there were zero positive Covid tests among staff and residents, yet they must wait another week of zero [a worthless test deemed so by the CDC] before they may hear from the health department to release them from lockdown.

They are the only nursing home chain in Fairfax County that is keeping their residents prisoners under a false pretense when nobody has been sick with Covid-19 lately at this facility, only one or two staff and a resident were positive but asymptomatic, according to various staff members.

The staff is being forced to wear masks and shields and the residents wear masks, even those who live alone in their rooms and do not leave their rooms.

I explained to the young woman that I have just returned from Florida and few people were masked there, mostly tourists from New York and other liberal states. The locals were getting sunshine, vitamin D, and fresh salty air. Florida flu cases had dropped to one of the lowest levels in the country.

I asked Martina, since the flu season is starting as the cold fall and winter seasons are moving in, prime time for any type of flu, are they going to keep everyone locked down in perpetuity as it is impossible to keep the population at zero flu cases? Her answer was, of course not. However, she could not tell me what the company’s plans were. I asked her about the facility’s death statistics, and she told me that she did not have those numbers, only corporate does. Who exactly does have those numbers at corporate? Not surprisingly, she did not know.

Martina did say that they must wait on the health department of Virginia and the CDC guidelines before they can allow patients to be free again. All the other nursing homes have been allowing visitations for weeks now while Pro Medica is keeping their nursing home patients under draconian lockdown.

Criminals in prison are treated better and have more freedoms than these patients have. As I tried to argue my point, it was ignored, Martina was only interested in reading the prepared script to me in its totality and did not like to be interrupted.

The insanity of these controlling people with their manufactured pandemic is appalling. Zoo people in Tampa, Florida, are giving Covid-vaccine to skunks because this gain-of-function flu virus is found both in animals and humans.

Covid-19 will never be eradicated among humans like the polio was. The polio virus hosted only in humans, never in animals, it was therefore possible to eradicate it in most western countries.

Are cases of previously eradicated viruses like polio coming back? Perhaps from third world nations, whose citizens are now pouring through our non-existent southern border, individuals who are neither tested nor forced to be vaccinated against their will like American citizens are.

Flu viruses mutate constantly. That is why each year people get a flu shot with a concoction of what pharma thinks may or may not be effective this year, with a success rate of below 50 percent. Are people in nursing homes in the U.S. and elsewhere in places like Australia going to be locked down for the rest of their remaining lives?

Something does not compute when the same people who told us that the earth is overpopulated and we must be culled down to less than a billion, are now trying to save our lives with a vaccine.

 

Financial Outcomes of Lockdowns

Our fifty states are interconnected through trade and travel and states that did not enforce lockdowns are still affected by states that chose to shut down completely. Blue states, poorly managed to begin with and tightly locked down, are clamoring for a piece of the huge financial rescue coming from Washington.

This welfare is enabled by the Treasury’s money printing without any backing of goods and services faster than paper can be supplied thus contributing to the rising inflation, inflation partially hidden by the elimination of fuel and food from the proverbial basket of goods that determines each month the rise and fall of prices.

In addition, the disastrous executive orders passed in the first 100 days of the new presidency have affected our economy quite negatively, coupled with the out-of-control spending, much of it totally unrelated to the pandemic effects. Temporary and permanent effects of the lockdown have disrupted the economy and bankrupted many small businesses and larger ones that were already struggling before the “pandemic” hit.

If data is compiled and reported correctly, it is obvious how GDP has been affected by lockdowns in terms of loss of consumption, investment, government spending, and trade with other countries.

We had a relatively large working population “pre-pandemic,” now Americans are being paid more to stay home while employers are struggling to find people willing to work in service sectors.

We had, at one time, the most productive workers in the world. The U.S. economy used to make at least $40,000 worth of goods and services for every living American and over $80,000 for every working American. (William J. Baumol and Alan S. Blinder, Economics, 2007)

To find out what the total output of the economy is, you must look at the gross domestic product (GDP) which is comprised of consumption (the largest component), investment (I), government spending (G) and next exports (X-IM, exports minus imports). Government buys goods and services from private businesses amounting to about 18 percent of GDP, it does not produce goods, but it provides services. Two-thirds of GDP is consumption.

When you look at the GDP number for 2020, you can measure the size of the economy, what it produced in final goods and services that year. The real GDP shows adjustment to the economy in the purchasing power of money by correcting for inflation (increase in prices of goods and services every American buys). As you can plainly see in grocery stores and at the gas pumps, these two important elements for every household have skyrocketed in prices. Yet they are no longer included in the basket of goods used to measures inflation.

Economic data hides the human factors that cause immense suffering in a terrible economy marked by a terrible GDP.

Take the world-wide Great Depression of the 1930s. The U.S. GDP dropped 30 percent, business investment was almost non-existent, and the unemployment rate grew from 3 percent in 1929 to 25 percent in 1933. In the labor force, one person in four was jobless. And the government was not handing out unemployment and stimulus checks. Soup lines, closed factories, people begging, and homeless were at an all-time high.

NPR reported that GDP shrank at the annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020, “the sharpest economic contraction in modern American history,” as reported by the Commerce Department. GDP Drops At 32.9% Rate, The Worst U.S. Contraction Ever : Coronavirus Updates : NPR

The estimated real GDP for the first quarter in 2021 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis is an increase of 6.4 percent. This figure reflects some economic recovery, reopening “establishments,” and government assistance payments, such as direct economic impact payments, expanded unemployment benefits, and Paycheck Protection Program loans, distributed to households and businesses through the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act and the American Rescue Plan Act.

“The full economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be quantified in the GDP estimate for the first quarter of 2021 because the impacts are generally embedded in source data and cannot be separately identified.”  Gross Domestic Product, First Quarter 2021 (Advance Estimate) | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

But how does one correctly estimate and quantify the loss of economic welfare on a societal level which impacts the economy?

-          Suspended or permanently lost freedoms for almost 15 months now

-          Permanent or temporary effects on mental health

-          Loss of economic opportunities due to the lockdowns

-          Loss of investment in human capital due to closed schools (students learned precious little in public schools or in college for over a year now)

-          Personal and professional loss resulting from inability to travel for business or leisure

-          Educational, friendship, and family losses due to lockdowns

-          Children being out of school and not in contact with outside humans

-          Adults being out of the labor force and not in contact with colleagues

-          Mental and physical uncertainty

-          Loss from proper medical care when care was virtual and inadequate

-          Loss from ability to go to hospitals due to fear of contagion

-          Loss from death because of other neglected serious medical problems

-          Severe loss from lack of socialization of people of all ages

-          Loss of our humanity and identity due to masking everywhere

-          Social distancing caused more than just reduced economic activity, it profoundly affected many individuals

-          Loss of entrepreneurship (some was replaced by a robust mushrooming of production of personalized masks and shields)

-          Loss of innovation

-          Small business formation collapsed except those supporting the lockdowns and mask wearing (door delivery, curb delivery, contactless credit card use, fashionable masking accessories and gloves)

-          The disappearance of buffets; new and permanent sanitation rules in retail and food processing and serving

-          Losses from wedding venues, birthday, and other parties

-          Banned activities such as going to church and everything related to it are not counted in GDP as a loss

-          Playing sports and attending professional and amateur games damaged economic activity in concessions and booster club activities/fund raising

-          The huge cost resulting from the lost value of living due to lockdowns, of seeing and associating with family

-          The loss of leisure time, i.e., traveling abroad, going on a cruise, on vacation, to a wedding, to a graduation, birthday, etc.

-          Loss of mental health, disability, suicides from lockdowns, drug overdoses, increased drug use and dependency, child abuse, elder abuse, and spousal abuse.

In his book, Economics in One Virus, Ryan A. Bourne wrote that “a third to a half of even the near-term decline in early phases of the pandemic was purely due to the lockdowns, as opposed to panicked changes in behavior from risk-averse consumers and workers.” (Cato Institute, 2021, p. 79)

Bourne wrote that there was a decline in vaccines for other child diseases, cancellation of elective surgeries by hospitals that potentially made a person’s health worse and increase in nursing home deaths that were not related to Covid.

The Covid-19 lockdowns in various states have had and are still having an economic impact that may or may not be correctly and fully quantifiable.  Bourne wrote, “Mercatus Center economists James Broughel and Michael Kotrous conclude that the initial lockdown measures probably cost somewhere between $255 and $464 billion in lost output (1.2 to 2.2 percent of 2019 GDP).”

Economic activity is much easier to calculate but how do you quantify the loss from schooling alone, what economists call “human capital accumulation?” And how does one quantify all the other intangible losses? What kind of subjective yard stick can one possibly use?

A lot of money has been created and a small part was distributed to the population in the form of various payments, stimulus checks, unemployment, and extended unemployment checks, etc. The money created did not go to economic growth or investment as people either were not allowed to work, their employers went bankrupt, the jobs went away, few new jobs and businesses were created, and many chose to stay home as the government’s weekly welfare checks was more than they were making while working. So, the increase in the money supply then caused inflation.

Investments were made heavily in the real estate market and construction market as people were fleeing mismanaged and locked down blue states. Housing prices and construction materials, especially lumber, have skyrocketed.

Consumption goods prices increased as well as retailers were unable to get enough merchandise stock in the brick-and-mortar stores and consumers turned to Amazon online and to other giant retailers that could remain open to the detriment of mom-and-pop stores that were not allowed to stay open.

The excessive money creation means that we have too much money chasing too few goods, inflation is high, and people want to invest in tangible goods such as real estate and precious metals, hence their prices are going up.

The lockdowns were exaggerated responses to a mismanaged health crisis and a rush to vaccines, but it was mostly a money supply-created crisis in order to generate the precise outcome we are facing today – high unemployment, high inflation, more government dependency, huge government spending (on political pet projects domestically and internationally), high gas prices and less mobility, high energy, less access to proper medical care, forcing solar and wind generated energy to fully replace fossil fuels, some of the many items on the agenda of the Great Reset/Build Back Better. The long-term global effects of the “new normal,” caused by the flu virus and by the subsequent opportunistic response to it, are not going to be pretty.