Tag: nursing home deaths

The ‘Covid Cocktail’: Inside a Pa. nursing home that gave some veterans hydroxychloroquine even without covid-19 testing

Washington Post logoSPRING CITY, Pa. — They wrapped the dead in body bags and raced back to treat the living, crammed into a nursing home that, day after day, played the somber sound of taps over the speaker system so the veterans who lived there had the chance to say goodbye.

The nurses and aides at the Southeastern Veterans’ Center in the suburbs of Philadelphia had watched so much go wrong since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The communal dining that lasted into April, the nights that feverish patients were left to sleep beside roommates who weren’t sick yet. “Merry Christmas,” one nurse told another when they finally got N95 masks, weeks into the crisis and just before administrators stopped staffing the isolation rooms because too many people were feared infected.

But what worried some nurses most was what they called the “covid cocktail,” the widespread, off-label use of one of the antimalarial drugs touted by President Trump in March as a potentially game-changing treatment for covid-19. Continue reading.

‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 7,000 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes

New York Times logoMore than six weeks after the first coronavirus deaths in a nursing home, outbreaks unfold across the country. About a fifth of U.S. virus deaths are linked to nursing facilities.

The first warning of the devastation that the coronavirus could wreak inside American nursing homes came in late February, when residents of a facility in suburban Seattle perished, one by one, as families waited helplessly outside.

In the ensuing six weeks, large and shockingly lethal outbreaks have continued to ravage nursing homes across the nation, undeterred by urgent new safety requirements. Now a nationwide tally by The New York Times has found the number of people living in or connected to nursing homes who have died of the coronavirus to be at least 7,000, far higher than previously known.

In New Jersey, 17 bodies piled up in a nursing home morgue, and more than a quarter of a Virginia home’s residents have died. At least 24 people at a facility in Maryland have died; more than 100 residents and workers have been infected at another in Kansas; and people have died in centers for military veterans in Florida, Nevada, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington. Continue reading.

Hundreds of nursing homes with cases of coronavirus have violated federal infection-control rules in recent years

Washington Post logoOf about 650 homes with publicly reported coronavirus cases, 40 percent have been cited more than once with violations related to infection control, a Post analysis found

Forty percent of more than 650 nursing homes nationwide with publicly reported cases of the coronavirus have been cited more than once by inspectors in recent years for violating federal standards meant to control the spread of infections, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Since 2016, the nursing homes accrued hundreds of deficiencies for unsafe conditions that can trigger the spread of flu, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and skin diseases. Dozens were flagged by inspectors only months before the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States.

Among the facilities with infection-control infractions: the Pleasant View Nursing Home in Mount Airy, Md., where 24 people had died as of Thursday; the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center near Richmond, with 49 deaths as of Thursday; and the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center in southwestern Pennsylvania, where officials have warned that all 750 residents and staff members could be infected. Continue reading.

Police discover 17 bodies in New Jersey nursing home hit hard by COVID-19: report

AlterNet logoResidents of nursing homes can be vulnerable to coronavirus for a number of reasons: (1) the residents are older, (2) they are more likely to have chronic health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes, and (3) they share the facilities with a lot of other patients. And on Monday, according to the New York Times, police found the bodies of 17 people piled into a small morgue inside a nursing home in Andover, New Jersey about 50 miles from New York City.

Andover Police Chief Eric C. Danielson told the Times, “They were just overwhelmed by the amount of people who were expiring.”

Those 17 people, however, are not the only ones who have died at the Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center I and II in Sussex County, New Jersey. Altogether, according to the Times, 68 people have died in that nursing home (which includes two separate buildings). Among those 68, 26 had tested positive for coronavirus, although Times reporter Tracey Tully notes that the cause of death is “unknown” for the other 42. Continue reading.