
1/4 Covid Deaths Are in Nursing Homes - frlnBorg
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nearly-26-000-nursing-home-residents-died-of-covid-19-federal-tally-shows-11591053033
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cityofdelusion
The United States needs to take a long, hard look at the current culture of
dumping the elderly into a nursing home. From what I understand, there are
many cultures that instead take in the elderly into their own homes or try to
keep them in their own home. I remember reading a good book on the subject,
_Being Mortal_ by Dr. Gawande, a few years back. It was an eye-opener to the
realities of how we treat end-of-life care in the U.S.

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glofish
not sure why you think this is a US problem, in other countries these ratios
are even higher

it is a developed world problem

simply put the way people live/work is not suited to multi-generational
families - I wish it were

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ianai
Agreed. Blaming one another isn’t constructive. Framing it as a needed
cultural change goes further.

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awillen
I don't think nursing homes are as terrible as they're made out to be, at
least not as a general concept. The issue, in my view, is much like the issue
with private prisons - you have a highly vulnerable population with little
recourse against the people in charge, because those people have so much
control over residents' lives.

There should be much greater regulation along with frequent inspections and a
mandate that residents have information in their rooms about how to report
issues directly to the government.

Those things obviously wouldn't help with the coronavirus issues at present,
but having that type of government infrastructure involved with nursing homes
would have put a lot of pieces in place to allow for a more consistent and
coherent response when we started seeing Covid cases.

Of course we also needed PPE and testing en masse at nursing homes early on,
so maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

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duckMuppet
There already is "greater regulation"..

In fact in NY the nursing homes themselves pleaded with the governor to not
force the return of these COVID positive individuals back to the nursing
homes. The governor of NY actually scrubbed his order from the state website
sending these infected patients from hospitals back to nursing homes and
assisted living facilities.

You can use whatever asinine ideas You like to protect your stance on big
government. Not enough government wasn't the problem here, the government was
essentially sending smallpox blankets into these at risk communities. If those
people voted blue or were one of the protected classes, the access media would
be all over this.

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taeric
This actually sounds low, from the other sources I was seeing. At one point, I
could have sworn it was about half.

At any rate, this is shocking in how skewed it is. Not clear what the takeaway
is. That we need a better story for an immunity later between at risk groups?

I'm still not sure, either, how this squares with the current mask story.
Nursing homes bad at cleaning and isolation of sick individuals? Feels off.
But not shockingly so. Regardless, hard to see how people in a mask at the
grocery are somehow preventing people in long term care from getting it, at
large.

Edit:. I say all of that as someone that is wearing a mask nowadays.

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duckMuppet
I think it's close to around 44% by recent numbers.

However, NY recently revised how they are counting these deaths, and they now
count them in a way where if the nursing home resident is transferred to the
hospital, they are generally not counted as a nursing home death. Up until
very recently, they were counting that as a nursing home death the same as
every other state in the union.

They've been the only state to make such changes so far, but the governor did
make a deal with the nursing homes to limit their liability during this
situation as well so this is pretty much par for the course here.

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mynegation
This number is for USA. For Canada (as of 7th of May) 82% of deaths have been
in long term care [1]

[1] [https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/05/07/82-of-
ca...](https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/05/07/82-of-canadas-
covid-19-deaths-have-been-in-long-term-care.html)

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lsllc
Here's another article (May 26th) with stats as of May 22th that claims 42% of
C19 deaths are from assisted living:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...](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/#9427a4874cdb)

In a number of states its a much higher percentage.

