The U.S. Is Repeating Its Deadliest Pandemic Mistake (The Atlantic)

[Mike 03]

The Atlantic
OLGA KHAZAN
10:40 AM ET
July 6, 2020

More than 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths have been in nursing homes. Here’s how it got so bad, and why there might still be more to come as cases surge in the Sun Belt.

In early april, Melvin Hector, a geriatrician in Tucson, Arizona, went into Sapphire of Tucson Nursing and Rehabilitation to check on one of his patients, who had been sent to the hospital the previous day. Hector found the woman in her room, wearing a surgical mask. She had been tested for COVID-19, but the results had not yet come back. When Hector asked for a mask for himself, he says a nurse responded, “We don’t have any.”

“I say to her, ‘You’re going into the room; the other staff are going in the room. She just went out to the hospital for a respiratory disease. And we don’t have any masks in the building?’” Hector recalled in a recent interview.

“They’re on order,” Hector remembered the nurse replying.

When Hector reported the situation to the Arizona Department of Health Services, he said Sapphire ended their working relationship. (In an email to me, Sapphire claimed that it had never suffered shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and that the nurse said she didn’t know where to find more masks, not that there were none. In response to Sapphire’s statement, Hector said, “They lie.”)

Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/us-repeating-deadliest-pandemic-mistake-nursing-home-deaths/613855/

[brush]

1. That's really bad, and sad. They should have those at the ready. And actually///

why didn't the doctor have his own mask?