Zeynep Tufekci tweeted this today:
Wow. A nursing home in Baltimore, oldest African-American one, did not lose *a single person* to COVID because as soon as they heard Trump say cases would soon go to zero, they realized it was going to be a catastrophe, stopped visits and masked up.
For contrast, a staggering 6% of all nursing home residents in New York and 12% in New Jersey died of COVID.
After they had to stop the visits to protect the residents, the nursing home director hired more staff to make sure the elderly residents had more activities within the nursing home so they wouldn’t feel as isolated. They also arranged for more social-distancing within the home.
And now they’re allowing for distanced porch visits, the sanest way to make sure the elderly have human contact, something essential, during the pandemic. We would all be better off if Revered Derrick Dewitt ran the US pandemic response from day one.
Another case:
Nursing home manager, Iraq vet, saw Seattle cases: started buying PPE, stopped visits. He learned of asymptomatic spread so he got staff to live at his home and in RVs next to the facility. He’s losing “a couple hundred thousand dollars” but no infections. https://wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/18/nursing-home-coronavirus-rvs
About 40% of US COVID losses are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities—an undercount, too. The examples above show this wasn’t inevitable. 40,000+ elderly people died, mostly alone and unable to breathe, because we didn’t have our act together. https://nbcnews.com/health/health-news/government-counts-26-000-covid-19-deaths-nursing-homes-s-n1221496
I don’t have anything to add. It’s a national horror.
And, obviously, the best thing anyone can do is do the opposite of Donald Trump.
Lest anyone thinks that perhaps that was inevitable and they were all going to die anyway as many of the Trumpies are saying, how about this:
That is heartbreaking.
I heard a couple of the experts noting yesterday that most of the new cases are among people under 50 and you just never know which of them are going to get very sick and wind up in the hospital. And they don’t know yet how much damage this disease does over the long term so even if if you get it and live, there is a possibility you won’t get your health back.
Also, people. Have a heart. You’re not just risking yourself you’re risking your friends and relatives for frivolous reasons. And if you have to go out, follow the guidelines. It’s the least any of us can do.