Russian roulette with one round in the chamber has a one in six (16.67%) chance of killing you.

This is only marginally less safe than being in a New Jersey nursing home, where 12% of the population succumbed to #COVID19.

This is a national disgrace.

There's no amount of talking about masks and re-openings and finger-pointing that erases this simple fact: political interference in nursing home operations has turned them into killing grounds for the virus.

If you *actually* want to know 'how the virus won', this is how. Irresponsible, reckless, meretricious, ugly, depraved, fascistic policies systematically exposing society's most vulnerable to lethal harm. There's a good part of your answer. Not all of it, but a big part.

It's very hard after this to take any of the hyperventilating about red states, blue states and re-openings. Criticisms of premature re-openings would be justified, but then the NJ and NY disasters are legitimately pitchfork-worthy.

A personal angle: I was a nursing home volunteer in school (to atone for certain sins yet to be determined). What a society 'is' and 'is like' is often reflected in how it treats its most vulnerable members. On that account, we roundly failed.

And as a profession, we failed – largely due to information overload: it's not until relatively recently that I got to see the data on this – by not speaking up against NY and NJ loading COVID-19 patients into nursing homes, up to and including encouraging refusal of such orders.

The public health establishment cannot be a sieve for political decisions, it needs to be a dam for the more egregious calls that put people at risk, and we dropped the ball on this. I am so, so incredibly sorry for that.

BTW, @propublica has an EXCELLENT investigation on this: https://www.propublica.org/article/fire-through-dry-grass-andrew-cuomo-saw-covid-19-threat-to-nursing-homes-then-he-risked-adding-to-it – big props to @jbsapien and Joe Sexton.