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/

Week 9 of Forced Quarantine for Healthy Americans

Everybody must have bought all the toilet paper they needed because now grocery stores have toilet paper. I am not so sure if the food supply is adequate because the hoarders stopped panic buying but the shelves still look empty at my local grocery chain.

The draconian social distancing rules have added more lines, arrows, policing, one entry and one exit only, 50 plus lines of people outside Costco and Wegman, waiting to get into the grocery store to buy their weekly necessities. Before this opportunistic viral plandemic, most grocery stores stocked three days’ worth of groceries, now it looks more like a couple of hours’ worth.

The progressive population around me still wears N-95 masks for walks in the woods and give the rest of us dirty looks for NOT wearing facial masks. We are there to get fresh air, not to catch viruses which are abundant in nature and have always been. I am not so sure THIS virus even exists in nature.

Stores are still closed for the good of the fearful and the moronic inhabitants of northern Virginia who don’t seem to listen or behave well, the governor and other local powers that be told us, we keep having cases of new infections among the illegal construction workers who don’t care about viruses, they just want to feed their large families and work in close proximity to each other, building more townhomes and apartments for the Democrats flooding the area.

Since we have not declined our infected numbers, as prescribed by the doctor-in-chief, Fauci, the governor was petitioned by the third layer of government, the local ones, to extend our quarantine for the healthy indefinitely.

The street are completely dead and silent, save for the wild animals coming out of the woods in the absence of humans, looking for food, and crossing the streets in the middle of day and walking behind our homes – coyotes, foxes, deer, racoons, and the ever-present squirrels which have multiplied since the lockdown weeks ago – nobody drives much to kill them accidentally.

The cops are everywhere, bored but ever-vigilant for the few unlucky drivers who venture out to essential stores such as grocery, pharmacy, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Office Depot, liquor store, the legal marijuana shop, and who happen to speed on an otherwise empty highway.

On weekends, when the traffic picks up a bit, it is obvious that people have forgotten how to drive properly during their nine weeks of forced quarantine for the healthy. They look tired, harassed, old, and like woolly mammoths with unkept hair of all colors flying in the wind like SOS banners.

The parks are still closed but people are inventive – they park on the side of the highway and enter the parks on foot or pretend to go fishing with their children. To be sure to not be stopped, they all wear facial masks, some of them professional grade for good measure.

The gas stations seem deserted because nobody has anywhere to go much but gas prices remained steady at $1.89/gallon.

People give themselves haircuts or learn to wear caps and hats again with their favorite team that is no longer allowed to practice or play.

High school and college graduates’ families have made makeshift podiums in their front yards to make-believe that their graduating children will have a memorable experience – Covid-19 Lockdown Graduation 2020.

After having cleaned their homes to a sparkling shine and planted all the flowers allowed because vegetable seeds are forbidden in some states or cannot be found, people stay on social media too long, desperate for human contact, especially on Facebook but are angry because they are being put in Facebook jail for their opinions even though we have a constitutional right to free speech.

Facebook hired censors to shadow-ban us and to factcheck our thinking and our opinions against such vaunted leftist opinions from media such as USA Today, Yahoo News, Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Times, etc.

We are allowed medical Zoom conferences with our doctors who hide behind their computer screens at home instead of practicing medicine in their offices and touching patients they are supposed to help.

Pharmacists yell at customers who dare come too close for comfort even though they are now hiding behind six feet of space, masks, a counter, and tall Plexiglas for their protection from the unwashed and contagious masses.

The banks are also closed for our protection but it does not matter because, after Nancy Pelosi passes another $3 trillion stimulus package to pay their crony capitalists to remain in business and the ever-climbing unemployed to stay home and not ever work, your money will be worthless against rising prices deriving from the upcoming galloping Weimar Republic-style inflation.

We are thankful that we still have trash pickup as we generate tons of garbage from staying home. The mail runs much earlier than usual because there is not much correspondence, bills to pay, or ads as stores have remained closed for at least two months and are not planning on opening soon, many having declared bankruptcy. But Amazon, FedEx, and UPS are busy delivering groceries to neighbors and whatever else they shopped for.  Mountains of cardboard boxes are waiting on the curb to be picked up by recyclers.

Some have asked me recently if this reminds me of living under communism. The answer is yes and no. The lockdown seems like prison, but it is a gilded prison by comparison as we have all the luxuries of western wealth and civilization that we did not have under communism. Deliveries of goods, food, and prepared food did not exist then.

The censorship of speech, assembly, religion, is fast developing into a much stronger censorship than we had under communism and it is more insidious as today’s technology makes spying on people so much easier and cheaper.

The Democrat Party has turned into the Socialists and Communists we feared, yielding a lot of power over our lives.

Our President today has been neutered quite effectively for the “collective good.” The communist dictator we suffered under yielded absolute power.

There are isolated cases, for now, of people violating lockdown orders, and paying fines and going to jail, but I am not sure communists have released hard-core criminals from jail for their own health. That is something entirely different that no communist regimes have engaged in. Many were sent to gulags for their political leanings, speech, associations, and thought. For now, we are just censored in the U.S.

Constitutional rights here have been suspended just like they were under communism. They were spelled out on paper but the Communist Party, like the Democrats, did whatever they wanted with their citizens who were locked down between borders and inside their homes.

A semblance of healthcare was provided under communism, best for the elites, like today. We did not have virtual conferencing and virtual doctors then, hospitals were not closed for lack of patients, we just did not have many hospitals or drugs to treat the sick. Today, people are scared to go to hospitals and their doctor’s offices are closed. You must take your own temperature and blood pressure.

How close are we to communism? In some ways we are quite close, in others, we still have a bit to go. But, at the rapid rate of freedoms lost, it will not be long before we live under a totalitarian regime in the U.S. as well. I just hope that the food and drug shortages to come will not be as severe as I have experienced in my first twenty years of life under communism.

From our vantage point, although in the grand scheme of things, it does matter where this not-found-in-nature Covid-19 virus has originated, like the Roman soldiers, who only cared abut the pebble in their shoes, the average American wants to live in a free and dignified way. Yet, the more we ask for freedoms we have lost, the more we are ignored and hear the chains rattle.

Mr. President, Can We Return to 'Made in America' Again?

On March 9, 2020, I flew back to D.C. The flight was more than half empty which was quite unusual – all flights to D.C. have been running at full capacity prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now remaining flights are almost empty with demand down in some cases by 96 percent.

A month later I wrote an article asking President Trump to open up the economy as it became more evident that the supply and delivery chains have been severely disrupted by the draconian quarantine-driven lockdowns of individual Democrat states, lockdowns which are yet to be lifted partially or fully. This resulted in closing small American businesses, the bread and butter of our economy. https://canadafreepress.com/article/open-up-the-u.s.-economy-as-soon-as-possible

Usually a quarantine is established to separate sick people from the healthy and, as the word says, it is meant for 40 days. But the state governors have decided to lock down healthy people, beyond the 40 days, with plans of more in-home confinement, robbing them of their freedom of assembly, religion, speech, and freedom of movement.

With 30 millions out of work and fudged death numbers from Covid-19, the hysteria has built up to the point where people are afraid to even get out of their homes without a mask, much less go to work.

Unemployment checks, ginned up fear and panic, bailouts, and forced government closures of businesses based on random decisions of “essential vs. non-essential” have further exacerbated the problem of returning to work. Social interaction has become evil in less than two months of constant government PSAs on TV, radio, print media, and grocery stores.

Salesmen in America used to travel around the country to small towns USA in the 70s-80s and found every little town with a town square with stores and factories around the town where people would be employed. Those factories sit empty now, victims of the production exodus to the Communist China or the buildings have been razed to make room for some other development. In light of the Covid-19 manufactured crisis which is destroying the world’s economy, the obvious question must be asked, why can we not build things in America again?

There are many products in short supply right now but freezers, upright and chest type, are something that we never thought would be hard to find. One store offered to order a freezer but it would not arrive earlier than June and, if things do not improve, it may be August or later.

A local owner of a furniture appliance store said that “there are no freezers, there is a national shortage.” An order could be placed but the supplier suggested the earliest tentative arrival as the end of May or June.

Then the  owner launched into a discussion about what is going on in this country and how wrong this shutdown is. He said, that if the mayor had told him that he had to close his shop (a business he has built over decades), he would have gone to jail rather than close his store. He was of the opinion that shutting down the country and businesses is completely ludicrous.  He also added that most who come into their store ask if the appliances are made in America.

In a 2015 Consumer Report recommendations for best freezers, about half of them were made at the time in the U.S. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/05/best-american-made-appliances/index.htm?EXTKEY=NW0N01506

In a 2019 interview, Marc Blumenthal said that “an Amana chest freezer and a Maytag upright freezer are made in Ottawa, Ohio.” https://www.cleveland.com/business/2015/06/ohio-built_appliances_are_among_the_best_made_in_america_consumer_reports_says.html

Should we as consumers put pressure on suppliers and store owners to have more made in America products and parts? Is it right to export most of our manufacturing to an inimical country, one ruled by the Communist Party at that, when it is not in our best interest?

If you can’t find a freezer right now and you wish to purchase one, perhaps you should join a grassroots campaign to bring back more manufacturing to America under American ownership.

There are many former manufacturing hubs around the country where factories are sitting empty. Can't Americans who have the know-how re-purpose old factories? President Trump has certainly advocated so for a long time. America needs to manufacture its own products, especially key industries for our nation’s security such as defense, steel, medical equipment, computers, pharmaceuticals, meat packing, vitamins, appliances, and other essentials for our food supply.

These are unintended consequence of a Chinese produced Covid-19 crisis. We have allowed China to control manufacturing in the U.S. of formerly Made in America products. For a list of products still made in America check here and the reference list at the bottom of this article. www.americanmanufacturing.org

In order to return manufacturing to the U.S., we must train a better skilled workforce. Not everybody needs to go to college to get an unmarketable degree in social and racial justice for which there are so few jobs. It is noteworthy that you prefer justice to rule the world but can you feed and shelter your family with a worthless college degree? Many technical and manufacturing jobs pay so much better and you don’t have to spend your parents’ life savings on expensive college tuition. And there is always huge satisfaction at the end of the day for a skilled job well done.

Made in the USA reference list:

https://www.actforamerica.org/made-in-usa

https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/made-in-america

https://www.madeinamerica.co/pages/thelist

https://madeinusaforever.com/

https://stillmadeinusa.com/kitchen.html

https://americansworking.com/guns-made-in-the-usa/amp/

https://anytownusa.com/

https://www.everythingkitchens.com/made-in-the-usa.html

http://www.strictlyusa.com/

https://www.themadeinamericamovement.com/made-in-usa-companies/

https://www.usalovelist.com/

https://arisindustrial.com/made-in-usa/

Quarantine Quandary

Photo courtesy: Facebook Timeline Photos

As the ISIS crisis is conveniently ignored right before the election, the main stream media is focusing on the next crisis, the Ebola spread and the schizophrenic response from the CDC. Meanwhile Congress is silent, waiting for guidance on what opinion they should form before they actually do the job they were elected to do, legislate to protect the best interests of the American people.

The Congressional Research Service has issued a report on October 9, 2014, RL 33201, outlining the federal and state quarantine and isolation authority. Jared P. Cole, Legislative attorney, overviewed the state and federal public health laws in regards to the “quarantine and isolation of individuals” when individual liberties will be restricted. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL33201.pdf

The state public health authority is derived from the Tenth Amendment. The federal public health authority to “prescribe quarantine and other health measures” is derived from the Commerce Clause, a clause that gives Congress authority to regulate interstate and international commerce.

Cole describes two measures that can be undertaken by health authorities in order to prevent those infected with or exposed to a contagious disease from infecting others:

-          Quarantine (separating individuals exposed to an infection but “not yet ill” from those who had not been exposed)

-          Isolation (separating “infected individuals” from those who are not infected)

http://www.flu.gov/planning-preparedness/federal/pandemic-influenza-implementation.pdf

The state health departments have primary quarantine authority.  (Cole, RL33201, p. 4)

“The federal government may assist or take over the management of an intrastate incident if requested by a state or if the federal government determines local efforts are inadequate.”  http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dq/sars_facts/isolationquarantine.pdf

Who is responsible for preventing the outbreak and spread of an infectious disease in the U.S.?

The Secretary of Health and Human Services has the authority granted by Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act to make and enforce regulations “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States.” (RL33201, pp. 4-5)

The HHS Secretary has broad authority to “apprehend, detain, or conditionally release a person.” The Secretary can only do so with communicable diseases that are included in the Executive Order 13295 of April 4, 2003. The diseases listed are cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and influenza viruses with the potential to cause a pandemic.

The HHS Secretary transferred quarantine authority in 2000 to the Director of the CDC. Measures for interstate and foreign quarantine are now under CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. http://www.cdc.gov/ncpdcid/dgmq/index.html.

Federal regulations authorize the “apprehension, detention, examination, or conditional release” only of persons coming into a state from a foreign country.” Ship captains and airline pilots are required to report immediately the presence of ill passengers on board their vessels.  “If found to be infected, such individuals may be detained for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary.” (Cole, p. 5)

If someone becomes violently ill on domestic and international flights, pilots are required to notify before arrival the CDC Quarantine Station closest to their destination airport. Twenty such stations are located at ports of entry into the U.S., assisted by DHS in “the enforcement of quarantine rules and regulations.”

Since we have not stopped flights originating from West Africa where Ebola has reached epidemic proportions, the probability of such infectious persons arriving daily is very real.

The Director of the CDC is in charge of preventing the spread of communicable diseases from state to state.

Cole said, “To prevent the spread of diseases between states, the regulations prohibit infected persons from traveling from one state to another without a permit from the health officer of the state, possession, or locality of destination, if such a permit is required under the law applicable to the place of destination. (RL33201, p. 7)

Cole added that the Secretary of HHS can bar the entry of persons from foreign countries if the “existence of any communicable disease” poses a “serious danger” of entering the United States. The “suspension of the right to introduce such persons and property is required in the interest of public health.” The 2005 proposed rule for this statutory authority was not adopted. (70 Fed. Reg. 71892)

Then there is the Do Not Board (DNB) list which was developed by DHS and CDC and made operational in June 2007. To make this list a person must be:

-          Likely contagious with a communicable disease

-          Ignorant or non-compliant with the recommended medical treatment (such as someone with antibiotic resistant TB)

-          Likely to board a commercial aircraft or boat

At the state level, state police has the authority of quarantine and isolation; time and manner vary from state to state. Most quarantine state laws are 40-100 years old, lacking the contemporary scientific knowledge of communicable diseases. (RL33201, p. 10)

Can an individual have the right to challenge his or her quarantine or isolation?

Some courts recognize the petition for a writ of habeas corpus, to test the legality of the detention. “Often petitioners seek a declaration that the statute under which they were quarantined is unconstitutional.” (RL33201, p. 11)

Here are some legal challenges described in Cole’s  report:

-          Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824, the Supreme Court “alluded to a state’s authority to quarantine under the police powers”

-          Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health, 1902, “addressed a state’s power to quarantine an entire geographic area” (even though commerce was affected, the quarantine was not unconstitutional)

-          In another case, the court ruled that “it is ‘well settled’ that states may impose quarantines to prevent the spread of disease even though quarantines ‘affect interstate commerce’”

-          Miller v. Campbell City (leaking methane and hydrogen gases prompted an entire area quarantine which was broken by a resident who tried to go home; the court decided that the quarantine was not in bad faith or malicious)

-          U.S. v. Shinnick (a female passenger who could not prove vaccination after arriving from a smallpox-infected area in Stockholm, Sweden, was placed in isolation)

-          People ex rel. Barmore v. Robertson (woman who ran a boarding house and boarded an infected person, was quarantined in her home as a carrier of typhoid fever)

-          O’Connor v. Donaldson (man diagnosed with tuberculosis was hospitalized a few days in New York against his will; the court ruled that a “state’s police powers may confine individuals solely to protect society from the dangers of antisocial acts or communicable diseases”)

-          Wong Wai v. Williamson (San Francisco Board of Health “ordered all Chinese residents to be inoculated against bubonic plague, restricting their right to leave the city, citing nine deaths allegedly from plague. The inoculations were tainted, causing severe consequences.”)

-          Jew Ho v. Williamson (the quarantine was discriminatory since it applied only to Chinese residents, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment; it questioned whether the plague actually caused the deaths)

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL33201.pdf

Cole raises the question of potential future legal challenges:

1.      Eminent domain

-          case of widespread domestic public health emergency, if the quarantine and isolation necessitate private facilities when medical facilities become overburdened

In August 2003, after a heat wave caused 11,000 deaths in Paris, the government took over refrigerated warehouses as temporary morgues.

The State of Washington, after a volcanic eruption, restricted access to a town near the volcano. The court declared the “exercise of police power permissible and did not require compensation.”

           

2.      Self-imposed or home quarantines

-          can a “state support a population asked to voluntarily stay at home for a period of time”

-          can a state provide “legal immunity to businesses asked to provide facilities for quarantine”

We have the power and rules in place for quarantine and isolation in order to safeguard the health of the people of the United States from illegal immigrants’ communicable diseases like Ebola and the enterovirus D68 which has already killed several children. Instead, Congress is busy playing politics with people’s lives in order to win elections and to support this administration’s immigration policy. Scanning someone’s temperature at the airport is a sick joke.

We are not stopping flights from the affected Ebola zones, and illegal alien children from Latin America are still entering through our southern border, and are still being dispersed among our healthy children. Our soldiers, highly trained for war but sent to West Africa to play doctors, are going to be placed in quarantine in Liberia in the event they should become infected with Ebola, while potentially sick West Africans are still given visas every day to fly to the “racist” United States for first class treatment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Butler on Business, August 6, 2014 Ebola Edition and Alan's Shingles

My talk with Alan about Ebola. He tells me about his bout with Shingles and the quarantine at Emory University Hospital. I come on at the 34 minute mark.
http://host1.cyberears.com//27306.mp3