Phil
Kerpen |Posted: Jun 24, 2020 12:01 AM
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are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
I recently testified before the House Select Coronavirus
Subcommittee on the meltdown in nursing homes, which excluding New York (which
deliberately underreports) now account for over 55 percent of deaths with
COVID. The House Democrats' goal was to blame these high death rates on
President Trump - but the blame should belong squarely to the handful of
governors who presided over these disasters.
More than 60 percent of both nursing home deaths and total
COVID-19 deaths occurred in just seven blue states with about 20 percent of the
U.S. population: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan. The governors in each of these states
ignored federal guidelines and pursued some version of the policy of admitting
infectious patients to nursing homes as soon as they were clinically stable.
Nationally about 2 percent of the long-term care population
has died with COVID-19 - but over 12 percent in Connecticut, 10 percent in New
Jersey, 9 percent in Massachusetts, and about 4 percent in Illinois. Even New
York's dishonest underreported number is 4.4 percent of the state's long-term
care population.
Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh mathematicians
showed back in March that efforts to shelter everyone would lead to a far
higher death total than efforts focused on the elderly, but the liberal
governors chose to ignore that reality - even as we've seen over 80 percent of
COVID deaths among seniors.
New York's policy was implemented via a March 25 advisory
that said: "No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the
[nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.
[Nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is
determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or
readmission."
The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine
warned in response: "Unsafe transfers will increase the risk of
transmission in post-acute and long-term care facilities which will ultimately
only serve to increase the return flow back to hospitals, overwhelming
capacity, endangering more healthcare personnel, and escalating the death
rate."
This caution was ignored and the policy stayed in effect
until May 10. New York presently reports 6,413 deaths physically in long-term
care facilities. Adding hospital deaths, which the state refuses to report,
would likely double or triple that number.
Similar policies in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania - where the state health secretary moved
his own mother out of a nursing home while sending infectious patients in -
produced similar outcomes.
As Dr. Anish Koka described it: "Two weeks into the
lockdown, Philadelphia hospitals had been emptied waiting for a New York-style
surge that never came... But nursing home patients were treated like patients
from the community who were too well to be admitted to the hospital - they were
sent home. The consequences of keeping these patients at the nursing home meant
the health system had to eventually deal with the entire nursing home being
infected."
Pennsylvania now reports at least 4,345 long-term care
resident deaths; all others are at least 2,054.
It isn't just state size. California nearly adopted
substantially the same policy as the meltdown states, but reversed it just two
days later - they didn't ignore the backlash. With a markedly different policy
in place, including sending COVID-negative nursing home residents out of Los
Angeles area facilities to the USN Mercy hospital ship to establish COVID-only
facilities, the state so far has lost only 1.1 percent of its long-term care
population, fewer total deaths in this cohort than little Connecticut.
By prohibiting readmission without effective infection
control and deploying the national guard, adequate testing, and PPE, Florida
reported long-term care COVID deaths at 1,664 as of June 21 - a quarter of New
Jersey's, and 1.1 percent of the state's large long-term care population. Texas
has fared even better, with less than half its COVID-19 deaths in long-term
care and presently at only 0.6 percent of that population.
Most states are now finally making serious efforts to test
their entire long-term care population.That's great, but if the CDC does not
fix its definition counting any death in the presence of the coronavirus,
nursing home residents with mild or asymptomatic infections will still show up
in the count when they die of other causes. The median nursing home stay before
death is just five months. If this definitional problem isn't fixed, deceptive
counts will add to the problem of misperceived public fear.
We need honest reporting and counting to understand the risk
of serious illness or death with COVID, and we need policies targeted to
protect the vulnerable - not to scare the public. And the governors who
presided over the carnage need to be held to account.
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