care homes

https://whyy.org/articles/covid-patients-and-nursing-homes-a-risky-but-possibly-lucrative-mix/

ut the city doesn’t have any regulatory power over these facilities — that’s the state’s job. The Pennsylvania Health Department guidance still instructs long-term care facilities to accept COVID-19 patients from hospitals, as long as they follow proper isolation protocols.

A department spokesman would not indicate how many facilities were doing this. The department is also encouraging facilities to keep positive patients together in a separate area.

Yep.  I said it before it even made it to the U.S.  Longterm care would be the frontline, but the workers there would be the least protected, and I was right, sadly.

No one in the press is going after Cuomo or other governors for putting Covid patients with the old folks homes instead of using the convention centers set up for that purpose.  I bet 50 % or more deaths are from assisted/independent living and nursing homes. After President Trump had Javier's Center set up to accept Clovid patents NONE went there Cuomo sent them to the old people's homes and killed a bunch of our elderly.  They go after Trump but not after Cuomo...no justice for the dead.

Just FYI... no one in the press is going after Cuomo because whatever information those that believe Cuomo forced facilities to take nursing homes has cherry-picked information (gee now there's a surprise.)   That very same order included that if the facility did not have isolation capabilities they were to contact NY HHS to deal with infectious patients.  This is where the failure came in.  HHS was never notified.  There is now an investigation to find out which facilities never bothered to contact HHS. To circumvent a further problem, Cuomo has ordered that all nursing home staff be tested twice a week and sent out 110,000 tests to get them started.  

Keep mentioning Cuomo and NY's failures.  You have a New Yorker on board who gets FULL information. Not the cherry-picked chit you get off Fox.  

I never said, nor ever will say Cuomo hasn't made mistakes.  But in this case, cherry-picked news to make him somehow more culpable and feed people pablum so they'll look elsewhere and blame, is not something I'll tolerate without calling it out as misleading.  I'm very disappointed that this forum seems to have become a fount of conspiracy theory and misinformation.

When all is done and dusted, I am comfortable with Cuomo's decisions and actions taken to mitigate damage to New Yorkers.

 

I think it was a mistake that cost a lot of lives, but I don't think he would have done it if he really understood the nursing home as an institution. Nursing homes certainly should have given pause to that decision and cautioned the governor on the realities.  I suppose nobody really wanted to say "we are good at what we do, but infectious diseases are not it." 

 Nursing homes just are not equipped for the scale of what they were asked to do.  Caring for groups of people with highly infectious diseases is a specialized task.  It requires highly trained staff in every discipline, right down to the kitchen and laundry workers, plus active supervision by people who genuinely understand infection control.  No offense to LPNs out there, but most nursing home nurses on the floor are LPNs who haven't spent much time working in hospitals, where the infection control training is more rigorous and frequently applied.  It's the difference between knowing what your supposed to do, mostly, and having a lot of experience doing it.  Many of those nurses are great at what they do, but they were asked to do something new without a lot of time to prepare for it.

Just as stupid here.  Our hospitals discharge covid patients into our care homes too.

The peak in cases has been and gone - but not in care homes, the death rate there is still rising.

So much for protecting the vulnerable.  Unofficial euthanasia anyone?

I have a friend who works as a hospice nurse in several nursing homes in San Diego, and she told me that many of the patients who are hospitalized after testing positive are eventually brought back to the care facility if they're healthy enough. The facilities she has experience of set up makeshift negative pressure rooms, and the Covid patients were kept there. I've worked in a few of the local hospitals, and they really don't have the capacity to isolate a lot of stable patients with respiratory infections. From what she's seen, there doesn't seem to be further spread once they return, and one of the facilities was declared free of Covid-19 after caring for several positive patients, and was allowed to return the rooms to normal operation. With the appropriate precautions in place, nursing homes that have identified infected patients within their facility can cope almost as well as a hospital. The key is knowing who is infected so they can be isolated from healthy patients, and the lack of a national testing strategy in the US is making that incredibly difficult.

Keep reading tabloids and watching Fox if that's what makes you feel better about your lot.  Play the blame game and refuse to look at the real issues.  Conspiracy theories are more fun and a better diversion than this travesty.