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Some things in life – and death – are more important than Wuhan Virus


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2021 Dec 5, 9:01pm   163 views  2 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://brownstone.org/articles/what-does-focussed-protection-mean-for-nursing-homes/?source=patrick.net


A large share of COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes. This represents a catastrophic failure of public health to act creatively to protect the older folks living there. The great mistake was thinking that lockdowns would be sufficient to prevent the disease from reaching this vulnerable population. It was not. Despite lockdowns, roughly 40% of COVID deaths have taken place in nursing homes.

Some nursing homes took this lesson to heart and moved heaven and earth to prevent COVID from entering the premises – a focused protection approach that I have advocated.

Others were obviously less successful.

But, I have to admit that even the focused protection approach has its costs. What do the experiences of lockdown and focused protection mean for people living in nursing homes and care homes? If you permit me, I will tell a story that illustrates the painful tradeoffs.

My friend, Glenn, died last summer. I met him a few years ago when he joined my church and the study I lead there every Sunday morning. His wife had just died of cancer, and he was looking to reconnect with the faith of his youth. Though we did not have much in common superficially, we hit it off almost from the first moment, and we always found stories to share that will forever enrich me. He was in his 70s and a cancer survivor when we met. In 2019, though, the cancer came back, and I feared it would be a tough haul for him. Unfortunately, it was.

As his health started to deteriorate, he could no longer take care of himself. He entered a nursing home in July 2020 in locked-down California. The terrible experience of nursing homes early in the epidemic in New York and elsewhere had taught Glenn’s nursing home that it was vitally important to keep anyone infected with COVID-19 out of the facility. It was a lesson they pursued with vigour.

His nursing home did some sensible things like providing high-quality masks for visitors and staff, symptom and temperature checking for permitted visitors, and scaling back events involving large gatherings. They also did some things that were not so sensible, like limiting the time that residents could spend outdoors to less than an hour a day, requiring that residents take all meals in their rooms alone, and enforcing a two-week, in-room quarantine after any trip outside the facility (including for doctor visits) – even after a negative PCR test.

Since I was not in Glenn’s immediate family, I was not permitted to visit. I went anyway, at least once a week, on Sunday during his brief outdoor time. The rules more or less ensured every resident was lonely, and Glenn felt the lack of companions acutely. His son and younger daughter live locally, and they would visit, which made him very happy. But Glenn craved connection with his friends. So I went anyway, despite the restrictions.

There is a fence at the edge of Glenn’s nursing home complex. He and I would visit – outdoors, both masked, each of us six feet from the barrier. We had to yell so that we could hear each other. If either of us approached the fence, a staff member was there, waiting to reprimand us.

It was frustrating – all the more so given the paucity of evidence that the virus spread efficiently outdoors – but also glorious to connect with my friend even though we were 12 feet apart.

Week by week, I watched Glenn shrink and fade. It was, in part, the cancer but, even more, it was the enforced isolation that took its toll on him. He did, however, remain safe from COVID-19; the disease did not spread in his nursing home during his residence, and he was never infected.

During our visits, he told me that he spent his days alone in his room, with no sense of time passing. Except for the occasional visitor – like his kids or me – his experience was essentially solitary confinement. Nursing home staff would set his meals outside of his room and leave before he retrieved them. No contact. Once, he fell while taking a shower, and it took a long time before a staff member found him unconscious. Far too long.

Two weeks before he died, Glenn’s older daughter came from out of state to visit her dad. They both knew that there would be no more chances to see one another after this. Glenn wanted to return to his home for a few days and let his daughter take care of him, but the nursing home told him that he would not be welcome back if he did – because of the COVID risk.

Glenn left anyway and had a sublime week with his daughter. I visited once, and his joy was palpable. It had a physical presence all its own and co-existed – side-by-side – with sadness about what lay ahead. We talked and prayed without masks or distance that day, and he told his daughter and me stories about his youth, which I will never forget.

Just before his daughter left for the long drive home, she begged his nursing home to take him back, and after a negative test, they finally did. Not long after that, Glenn died with his son and younger daughter nearby.

What is lesson can we draw from Glenn’s last days? Mainly this – if abstractions like lockdown and focused protection are imposed without regard to the human costs, only inhumane outcomes can result. The control of COVID-19 spread, even to vulnerable people, is undoubtedly good – but it is not the only good.

Some things in life – and death – are more important than COVID-19, and our public health authorities would do well to remember that fact.

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1   Patrick   2021 Dec 5, 9:03pm  

Good comments:


Yakima Peach

I've met plenty of elderly people who refuse to live isolated and in fear. They figure a life lived with others yet shortened by a virus would be better than being lonely and isolated.

Rob D

Same here. And any loved ones who are elderly right now in my life have already decided that they would rather die a bit earlier at home than go to a hospital or any kind of "care" home where they would not be "allowed" to have visits from anyone and if someone did visit they would be in full hazmat. Nope. Isn't going to happen. And I, also, have decided that I'd rather die free than EVER go to a doctor again for ANYTHING other than blood spraying out of my body somewhere. I'm done. They can keep their masks, shots, distancing etc. It's insanity. And I refuse to participate. It is NOT "normal".


I kinda feel like this as well:

I, also, have decided that I'd rather die free than EVER go to a doctor again for ANYTHING other than blood spraying out of my body somewhere.
2   WookieMan   2021 Dec 5, 9:52pm  

This sounds like my grandma pre-covid about 2016. She was 93 and dying, my aunt and uncle put her in a hospice facility. My wife happened to have a conference in Phoenix so I was able to have a last visit. We chatted for hours with our kids who she was meeting for the first time, well one of them. Doctors thought she was going to die before we left on that trip.

I ended up doing a second surprise visit to find out she was doing so well they had to clear her bed for someone else and she was move to another facility. We were in Phoenix for about a week. She started out completely bed ridden and by the time we left she was able to walk. It was quite the transformation.

In the end she didn't have companionship. I feel like we brought a spark back to her and gave her an extra two weeks. She died two weeks later. I don't blame him, but my uncle just found a "place" to put her. They'd visit once a week. I had not seen her in about 4 years prior to that last visit.

When you have no one by your side or visitors, it is a lonely existence. I can't say I've experienced it because I wouldn't be commenting here, but I have witnessed it with my dad and grandma. No one want to see a person on their death bed. What they don't realize is that all that person wants to see is friends and family. They don't want to be alone no matter how hard it is to see them in a declining state. You come into the world with all this attention and you slowly fade as those around you have died and younger loved ones are too busy to bother with you.

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