"Staff members told investigators that they were initially discouraged from wearing protective equipment, in an effort to conserve a limited supply, and that they felt “annoyed, paranoid and fearful for their lives because they could not find masks,” the report said.
The most troubling portions of the report describe the weekend of March 28 and 29, when staffing was so short at the home that two wards were hurriedly combined, a decision one employee described as “the most insane thing I ever saw in my entire life.”
A social worker described listening to the chief nursing officer say “something to the effect that this room will be dead by Sunday, so we will have more room here.” Another social worker recalled seeing a supervisor point to a room and say, “All this room will be dead by tomorrow.”" NY Times
————-
Were they thanked for their service at some point before the end? Did they receive "the thanks of a grateful nation?"
The Democrats want to f—k around with Trump over the names of Army posts where a lot of these men trained before going overseas. I was trained at Fts. Bragg and Benning. Are the Democrats interested in anything but their power and the present goodwill of their Marxist allies?
I doubt it. pl
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/holyoke-soldiers-home.html
“Are the Democrats interested in anything but their power and the present goodwill of their Marxist allies”
No, and they are busing enacting everything legislatively, or setting the stage for systemic failure, that they can and letting their allied cadres loose to enforce discipline on the citezenry. Enabling allies as well as a few thousand H1Bs from foreign nations are aided and abetting with the censorship of news, social media, and online campaigns of harassment. Appeasement and submission to thier demands occurs daily, even if it is only the donning of the now mandatory by decree mask.
Col. Lang,
This is evidence of what I have been afraid of – the use of Covid19 to reduce the numbers of old people needing expensive care in future. There are plenty of economists who would secretly support the idea of removing “useless mouths” and I also strongly suspect the initial British response to the pandemic was informed by such thinking.
Over here, half our capital city has been put into lockdown after a new outbreak. This is going to put major strain on the public. I am reliably informed that the outbreak has been traced back to a “lawless” extended family who didn’t change their behaviour when they started getting sick.
Sir,
A large number of Wuhan virus deaths have been in nursing homes.
Gov. Cuomo sent many to their deaths by forcing those seniors infected to nursing homes. But his brother keeps singing hosannas of praise on his show on CNN.
As I’m in the age group that could be in a nursing home this story hits home. In my living will I have instructed no nursing homes and no medical life support to keep me alive. I want to go with dignity on the land my grandpa bequeathed. Our ranch house has been rebuilt from the embers of the wildfires that consumed it. I’m gonna go here!
“Democrats interested … power … Marxist allies”
The post-American Democratic Party and globalist Republicans have mutually incompatible visions of the future, but neither of their enlightened internationalist futures has a place for either these men or their descendants other than as corpses or serfs.
Why are you blaming Democrats? A Republican is president and in control of the Senate. I speak as a nurse with 37 Yeats of experience. I’m sure your heart is aching but you are blaming the wrong people.
Colonel,
The response to the coronavirus pandemic in America is criminal manslaughter. Media Moguls avoid mentioning that the corruption and deaths are due to deregulation and privatization since that would cut into their incoming cash flow.
Nursing Home Managers let their patients die early because properly equipping their staff with Personal Protective Equipment and following standard infection prevention practices costs money and cuts into their bonuses. Americans will continue to die unless those who let the virus into the USA and who failed to require testing, tracing and isolation of the infected are all fired and replaced with people who can do the job. Corporations must be forced to protect their workers. Managers who knowingly allowed their patients and employees to be infected deserve jail time to deter this from happening again.
Nations with functional governments, a Public Health System and public participation controlled coronavirus. Some like Hong Kong with a government under stress but a functioning healthcare service and a united people still controlled the virus. The United States of America is isolated, unable to control the virus. The government is dysfunctional, there is no federal public health system, and Americans are divided – intentionally to allow the fleecing of the middle class.
The USA is now the Brazil of North America. Brazil is the USA of South America. #1 and #2 on the Coronavirus Pandemic list of number of confirmed cases and deaths.
The left likes to talk about tolerance. The right has been demonstrating it.
Nancy K
The Democrats are attempting to undermine everything he tries to do. Everything.
walrus
I interpret the nurse supervisor’s statement as one of resigned ironic despair.
I do not understand the endgame. Do the corporate allies of this madness really believe that they are immunizing themselves?
off topic but interesting:
Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested this morning in my old state of New Hampshire. Anyone taking odds?
Seems weird that it was NH. Not much socialite activity there.
My father was a public health physician all his working life, USAF and city government, and I am profoundly glad he did not live long enough to witness this debacle.
Doctors and nurses on television weeping in despair at how hard their lives are because of all the death and suffering that surrounds them. They apparently have little empathy. Death and suffering surrounds them and they are crying about how bad THEY feel and how badly THEY are suffering.
Public health officials, doctors themselves, PREDICTING WORSE TO COME, with the deliberate purpose of creating higher levels of panic. Both Fauchi and Birk preface their dire predictions with, “I am afraid that…” The 1st article of the Hippocratic Oath is “First, do no harm.”
“The authors also found that length of stay varied based on a number of demographic, social, and clinical factors. For instance:
men died sooner after admission than women (men had a median length of stay of around 3 months versus 8 for women)
married nursing home residents died sooner after admission than unmarried participants (an average of 4 months sooner)
nursing home residents in the highest quartile of net worth died six months sooner than those in the lowest quartile.”
I worked in a nursing home. Many women there seemed to survive quite well forming cliques, were socially active and the occasional drama of who was being excluded. Most men seemed to have the attitude of ‘Get me the hell out of here at any cost’
Vietnam Vet:
From Grauniad of the UK
All is well in this Orwellian COVID 19 world…
An update on COVID 19. The 1st article is about the WHO, which thinks that, in order to speed up the quest for the Holy Grail (also known as a vaccine), it would be a good idea to deliberately inject healthy patients with COVID 19 and see what happens — given how low the risk of death is. Sounds great but I don’t think I’d volunteer for this one, even if I were young and fit, which I no longer am anyway.
The 2nd article is about ‘harvesting’ and confirms what was talked about weeks and weeks ago, i.e. the fact the elderly, particularly those in care homes, have been left to die in the UK: ‘harvested’ means ‘sacrificed’, here. It is presented as a terrible tragedy no one expected. I would say, personally, that it was the plan all along: the word ‘selection’ springs to mind. One could add ‘Darwinian’ in front, as an adjective. And, now, we have over 30,000 dead, and everyone is so, so surprised.
The irony is that it is VE Day, today, commemorating the end of the Second World War, and paying homage to the generation that fought it and those who are left among them.
Maybe the Nazi ideology actually won? Far from being defeated in 1945, it is thriving in today’s Britain: in the BMA, in the NHS, in government, in Whitehall, among experts, among doctors, etc. The thing is: they haven’t realized that’s what they’re doing. Because no one has told them. Hence the cartoon, also from The Guardian.
_____________________________________________
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/08/who-conditionally-backs-covid-19-vaccine-trials-that-infect-people
WHO conditionally backs Covid-19 vaccine trials that infect people | Science | The Guardian
In new guidance issued this week, the WHO said that well-designed challenge studies could accelerate Covid-19 vaccine development and also make it more likely that the vaccines ultimately deployed …
http://www.theguardian.com
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/08/care-home-residents-harvested-left-to-die-uk-government-herd-immunity
‘Harvesting’ is a terrible word – but it’s what has happened in Britain’s care homes | Richard Coker | Opinion | The Guardian
Epidemiologists use the term to describe tragic excess deaths – but for Covid-19 it seems to be the de facto government policy There’s a term we use in epidemiology to capture the essence of …
http://www.theguardian.com
Please STOP with this nonsense!!
“Maybe the Nazi ideology actually won? Far from being defeated in 1945, it is thriving in today’s Britain:”
How convenient to have Nazis as the brand name for all-that-is-evil- in-saecula-saeculorumso that we don’t have to actually reflect on the vast crimes against humanity committed in even greater numbers than the fabled Nazis, in the many decades since Nazism’s relatively brief time in Europe, not to mention that the numbers of people — German and Japanese as well as French, Italian, Hungarian and other European civilians incinerated by Allied firebombing far exceeded comparable deaths inflicted by Nazis. That is a numerical fact; you may not have learned about Allied firebombing from Hollywood or History Channel, but it is an irrefutable fact and also the greatest destruction of infrastructure and humans-civilians ever in recorded history. Nazis did not firebomb Germany and Japan, Allies did. Nazis did not destroy Iraq, etc., successors to Allies did.
Why is it no one ever observes: “We [British] or [Americans] are doing to our own old people something similar to what we [British] or [Americans] did to the people of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Kosovo: “Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” ran out of target bodies before the murderous impulse ran out of steam — or maybe the impulse to murder on a vast scale was heightened by exercising it in foreign lands.
This is not Nazism Redux: This is US: this is American and other Anglo- as well as allegedly Judeo-Christians making the policy decisions; Nazis are DEAD!!
If you don’t believe that Nazism is DEAD, consider that the last 24 remaining Neo-Nazis who are being actively prosecuted by a Jewish group called Integrity First for America, are so marginalized, impoverished and ineffectual that they are unable to hire attorneys; unable to pay the few attorneys who agree to represent them; are forced to represent themselves against a battalion of lawyers funded by ADL and others to the tune of $10million.
Does that sound like a Nazi revival to you?
Sir,
This is calumny! Us Marxists are not their allies. I refuse to be associated with those base thieves. Marxists have principles. I am unfamiliar with anything American Democrats hold dear other than money.
Nancy K,
The president doesn’t run the states or cities, nor the Senate.
Babak – the UK response to the pandemic was not good. Many mistakes were made. I don’t think, however, the words “harvesting” or “sacrificing” are correct when applied to the then policy of HMG. That is because such words used in an everyday context
imply deliberate intent. There is a difference between deliberate intent and making the wrong call.
The response to the pandemic in the various Western countries has been discussed in earlier articles on the Colonel’s site. In those issues I have submitted references to what I believe to be the authoritative English website on the virus, Dr Richard North’s “eureferendum”. You will find on that site severe criticism of HMG’s approach.
But you will also find there an acknowledgement that the UK was grievously ill-prepared for this type of pandemic and has been for the past fifteen years at least. We are therefore reaping the results of fifteen years of neglect in the UK as much as suffering from the consequences of wrong decisions made today.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that there was no overall consensus as to how the pandemic should be dealt with – or indeed, whether there was a pandemic at all! Certainly in the early days there was an authoritative body of opinion to the effect that far too much was being made of the pandemic. Here is one such opinion –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=649&v=p_AyuhbnPOI&feature=emb_logo
– and international bodies were downplaying the seriousness of the infection until mid-February.
My own (lay) view is that not enough was done to combat the disease in the UK in the early days. But given the uncertainty of the medical advice, the poor state of preparedness, the unwillingness of the peoples of the UK to adopt inconvenient precautionary measures, and the economic effects of those precautionary measures, I don’t think we can attribute what happened in the UK to negligence and certainly not to malevolent intent on the part of HMG. They made what in hindsight turns out to have been the wrong call, that’s all. Happens.
Perhaps it’s worth stressing this point, for all that I myself have no time for the party currently in power in the UK. The use of the handling of the pandemic as a stick to beat Johnson with is I believe unjustified. We’d have ended up with much the same shambles whoever had been in power.
I followed as closely as I could the course of the pandemic in your country as well. I’m pretty sure that the handling of the pandemic as a stick to beat Trump with is similarly unjustified.
BillH,
I thought the reports from the doctors and nurses have been valuable. How else would we have known what was happening inside hospitals that would not admit family members? We have seen distress from medical professionals from not just here but other countries. Just because they are upset after putting in series of long days with little relief does not mean they care only for themselves and not their patients. If they didn’t care about their patients would they have been as upset?
I also don’t know how else public health doctors can deliver bad news than to deliver bad news. Fauci and Birx remain calm and pick their words carefully. What else would you like them or their colleagues to do? If you were in New York when things were bad it would have been right to feel a bit of panic since I have seen polls that said about half the people there knew someone who got it and about a quarter knew someone who died.
What do you suppose your father would have done in these circumstances?
jerseycityjoan
You are just making excuses for the killer politicians.
E.O.
You are just making excuses for the killer politicians.
You may recall that pretty little thing’s interview on the BBC, some sort of Junior Minister?
Obviously clueless and was giggling when discussing COVID-19 deaths in the care homes.
Artemesia:
Yes, indeed, exactly so.
There is a saying in Persian: “A man who rapes his own mother, God knows what he would do to others.”
From Great Britain
A cost-benefit analysis from A GP in UK – COVID-19 treatment.
Based on this logic, surrender in 1940 would have been the most humane, cost-effective, and rational option for the British Government.
I am reminded of what I read: “The Devil has the most reasonable arguments.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/485110-covid-19-lockdown-deaths/
Last evening on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Mark Steyn reported
Emmanuel Macron told the French, “You will not take down our
statues or change the names of our streets because this is our
history.”
On this particular topic the so called soy boy has shown more
chutzpah than the Repubs/Dems in office in the U.S. Unfortunately
we as a nation no longer value our history…book burning likely next.
JCJoan: Don’t worry about it – “It will just go away”. 🙂
@Babak, 1.12
The word “selection” springs to mind
Quarantine means all residents and staff are locked in for a specific duration with an outside body providing food and medicine. Quarantine was not applied to nursing homes. Staff were allowed to come and go without testing and without sufficient safety equipment or training. In addition, sick old people were sent from hospital back to the nursing home without testing and without regard to the fact that a nursing home is not equipped or staffed to be a hospital. Furthermore, old people in the community were advised to sign Do Not Resuscitate forms and not to call for an ambulance if they had a medical emergency. So I agree that the word “selection” seems an accurate description. The UK government certainly “harvested” the money from the unused pensions.
Another accurate description is “therapeutic nihilism” especially when a safe, generic, immunomodulatory drug regimen is available for early treatment to stop the infection developing into the lethal cytokine storm. This Moroccan scientist is commenting on Europe’s general non-use of HCQ (there were exceptions) https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2020/06/306587/moroccan-scientist-moroccos-chloroquine-success-reveals-european-failures/
I understand the the US government stockpiled enough hydroxychloroquine to treat 15 million people. How many people could have been saved if this stockpile had been used in time.
Heaven forbid, Babak! But if I read the Guardian article right it suggested deliberate intent rather than incompetence. I think incompetence is enough to account for what happened.
So much for the general question. Now, about these pretty Junior Ministers. I thoroughly disapprove. It has long been established that politics is show business for ugly people and as a small “c” conservative I think that’s how things should stay.
Babak and EO
I think the UK problem in care homes had more to do with the structural arrangement in the UK where most care homes are not NHS but relatively small commercial institutions with little or no ability to cope with infectious disease outbreaks in house. They also do not have, or routinely use, PPE and staff are not PPE trained. My son works in such an institution and they could not get the PPE they needed, had no budget to buy it anyway and the home had no room to increase physical separation. The biggest problem for them was staff. They had 3 homes in one area and staff would normally be rotated as required and they were heavily reliant on agency nursing staff who may have been supplied to an NHS hospital the previous day or another groups care homes. All of which makes for an accident waiting to happen. Normally care homes would look to the NHS to remove and treat patients but under epidemic conditions this could not always occur.
Johnson & Trump were slow to accept the seriousness of the situation initially expecting the health systems to cope without major problems. To their credit once the situation in Italy began to unfold they changed their tune but the lost time meant we were behind the curve in ramping up testing and PPE supplies for which there has been a price to pay.
Cirsium
Thank you for providing the details that I had not, for brevity’s purposes.
The “Do not resusicate” form and corresponding advice to the elderly showed clear intent to legal muder.
JJackson
UK has money for destroying Libya, fighting in Iraq, hijacking an Iranian tanker, or upgrading their nuclear weapons.
They did the same thing with the rail road service.
Squalor at home, aggression abroad.
JJackson,
“Johnson & Trump were slow to accept the seriousness of the situation initially expecting the health systems to cope without major problems. ”
The US federal government does not run health care systems outside the VA and the military. Each state is sovereign. Governors Cuomo and Whitmer of NY and MI were ineffective in dealing with this issue and disasterous in issuing orders that sent infected patients back to nursing homes. Other governors, for example DeSantis in FL, were much more effective. Trump’s use of executive orders to obtain PPE and the highly touted ventilators are both examples of him being effective. So was his elimination of multiple regulatory restraints mandated by the FDA on testing equipment or treatments.
On a bright note it looks like Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine. The experts and political opponents opposed that, including St. Fauci.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/07/02/michigan-henry-ford-health-study-finds-hydroxychloroquine-lowers-covid-19-death-rate/5365090002/
Chisum,
who forbid the use of hydroxychloroquine, it wasn’t Trump?
Babak I agree. I am against our military meddling and have been arguing for many years that pandemic threats are a national security threat and should be prepared for as such. The budget for our military adventures could have been used to maintain the PPE and essential drugs stockpile, enhanced wild life sampling and advance broadly acting anti-virals research.
Fred I appreciate the Presidents can not decree but heads of state set the tone. If they say it is nothing to worry about then many will listen. If they call for immediate action more will happen.