Governors who allowed Covid patients to be admitted to nursing homes were following FEDERAL

[pnwmom]

rules -- longstanding rules designed to allow nursing home residents to return to their nursing home after a hospital stay.

It is so easy to look back on a year ago and say those Governors made a mistake, but no one knew what we were dealing with at the time. We didn't know how the virus was transmitted, there was little testing available, and the Medicaid/Medicare rules told them to send these patients back to the nursing homes.

Where else were they supposed to go, when the overcrowded hospitals said they no longer needed hospital-level care? The nursing homes were their homes.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/3-13-2020-nursing-home-guidance-covid-19.pdf

Note: Nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present. Also, if possible, dedicate a unit/wing exclusively for any residents coming or returning from the hospital. This can serve as a step-down unit where they remain for 14 days with no symptoms (instead of integrating as usual on short-term rehab floor, or returning to long-stay original room).

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. Totally agree, and I remember arguing with wingnuts in my life about this back then ...

They were making hay out of it at the time, saying Cuomo is killing old people.

The homes are where these folk LIVE, and they're supposed to be medical facilities with medically trained staff. They also need to be able to handle infectious disease outbreaks, or they should be losing their licenses, and perhaps the owners of these places held accountable if they didnt' have adequate facilities to do so.

Ultimately, there was no logical 'somewhere else' for these residents who were positive for COVID, but not sick enough for hospitals ... TO GO.

That all being said, if there was a cover-up re: the numbers, that's a very bad look.

[pnwmom]

2. Right -- the serious error in NY wasn't allowing them to return to their homes,

it was misreporting the numbers, if that did happen.

[PoliticAverse]

3. You excerpted the part that did not discuss admitting someone _infected_ with COVID-19...

The paragraph above that specifically discusses the case of someone diagnosed with COVID-19...

When should a nursing home accept a resident who was diagnosed with COVID-19 from a hospital? A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 and still under Transmission-Based Precautions for COVID-19 as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions. If a nursing home cannot, it must wait until these precautions are discontinued. CDC has released Interim Guidance for Discontinuing Transmission-Based Precautions or In-Home Isolation for Persons with Laboratory-confirmed COVID-19. Information on the duration of infectivity is limited, and the interim guidance has been
developed with available information from similar coronaviruses. CDC states that decisions to discontinue Transmission-based Precautions in hospitals will be made on a case-by-case basis in consultation with clinicians, infection prevention and control specialists, and public health officials. Discontinuation will be based on multiple factors (see current CDC guidance for further details).

[pnwmom]

4. In the early months there was no testing to determine if someone was still infectious.

Remember how Trump refused the WHO's test and insisted on using our own, but our own didn't work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/18/timeline-coronavirus-testing/

3. Limited testing

The initial decision to test only a narrow set of people and delays in expanding testing to other labs gave the virus a head start to spread undetected — and helped perpetuate a false sense of security that leaves the United States dangerously behind.

Initial guidelines were so restrictive that states were discouraged from testing patients exhibiting symptoms unless they had traveled to China and come into contact with a confirmed case, when the pathogen had by that point almost certainly spread more broadly into the general population. The limits left top officials largely blind to the true dimensions of the outbreak.

SNIP

Feb. 13

Azar testifies in Congress that the CDC is working with five cities to add coronavirus testing to its regular flu surveillance to see whether “there is broader spread than we have been able to detect so far.” The labs are in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. However, the tests do not work.

Susan Butler-Wu, director of medical microbiology at the Los Angeles County and University of Southern California Medical Center, warns in an email in response to an inquiry from Congress: “We’re screwed from a testing standpoint if this thing takes off in the US."

SNIP

March 12

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies to Congress about the testing: “The system does not is not really geared to what we need right now,” he said. “Yes, it is a failure, let’s admit it.”

[orleans]

5. in the mid months we were still fucked

trump fucked this country over completely

between all the unknowns and the administration's incompetence and cavalier attitude ... it's fucking mind blowing

[uponit7771]

6. +1

[pnwmom]

7. By May Cuomo had ended the policy people are blaming him for.

Yes, Trump fucked us all over.

[hlthe2b]

8. They were supposed to be cohorted. I doubt a lot were, given the level of infection control

understanding in a lot of smaller nursing homes at the time. Not to mention the scarcity of PPE at the time. That said, the situation in NY was such that hospitals were overwhelmed and there were not a lot of options to try to open beds up for the masses of COVID patients needing them except to send nursing home residents back to their facilities. Later on, I'm sure they realized (it became painfully obvious) that more highly trained nursing staff and epidemiologists needed to come into these facilities to train them on proper cohorting procedures and infection control measures specific to COVID-19.

So, without knowing specifically that state officials were doing something intentionally negligent beyond this basic set of facts, I have to agree that this is a tragedy that would likely have occurred in many states, many facilities across the country, given circumstances.

[Scrivener7]

10. That's an important point. The field hospitals didn't appear in my area of NY until later in the

Spring. It seems like once they did, the policy changed.

[Scrivener7]

9. Kick! We all seem to forget that these were the days when the CDC was stating emphatically that

masks would do no good and we would all be fine if we just washed our hands properly.

I remember here on DU being called a ghoul because I said there would be more than 60,000 deaths.

This Monday morning quarterbacking is inevitable, but quite gross.

[pnwmom]

12. Thank you. You did a better job than I did of describing the chaos that existed then.

And it hurt NY worse than many other cities because NYC was the first city after the Seattle area to have an outbreak, and theirs was bigger.By the time it came around to much of the country, we had learned more, and had more supplies.