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Wow. A nursing home in Baltimore, oldest African-American one, did not lose *a single person* to COVID because as soon as they heard Trump say cases would soon go to zero, they realized it was going to be a catastrophe, stopped visits and masked up. https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-rodricks/bs-md-rodricks-0619-20200618-re2obahhbzbddojazrkf65gdoq-story.html
For contrast, a staggering 6% of all nursing home residents in New York and 12% in New Jersey died of COVID. https://twitter.com/AriSchulman/status/1273414592404828161
After they had to stop the visits to protect the residents, the nursing home director hired more staff to make sure the elderly residents had more activities within the nursing home so they wouldn't feel as isolated. They also arranged for more social-distancing within the home.
And now they're allowing for distanced porch visits, the sanest way to make sure the elderly have human contact, something essential, during the pandemic. We would all be better off if Revered Derrick Dewitt ran the US pandemic response from day one.
To the tons of people in my mentions saying what about New York's failures? That's the *second* tweet in my thread above and something I highlight—like below. So many assume we can't see failures everywhere they occur because of partisanship. You're wrong. https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1263889103810105350
Nursing home manager, Iraq vet, saw Seattle cases: started buying PPE, stopped visits. He learned of asymptomatic spread so he got staff to live at his home and in RVs next to the facility. He's losing "a couple hundred thousand dollars" but no infections. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/18/nursing-home-coronavirus-rvs
About 40% of US COVID losses are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities—an undercount, too. The examples above show this wasn't inevitable. 40,000+ elderly people died, mostly alone and unable to breathe, because we didn't have our act together. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/government-counts-26-000-covid-19-deaths-nursing-homes-s-n1221496
Here’s another example. This UK care home, without guidance or support from the government decided to completely lock down, with reduced staff living in tents and RVs. Not a single infection. https://twitter.com/hongkonghermit/status/1264636505714126849
