Iran Press/ America: More than six weeks after the first coronavirus deaths in a nursing home, outbreaks unfold across the country. About a fifth of US virus deaths are linked to nursing facilities.
The first warning of the devastation that the coronavirus could wreak inside American nursing homes came in late February, when residents of a facility in suburban Seattle perished, one by one, as families waited helplessly outside, The New York Times reported.
In the ensuing six weeks, large and shockingly lethal outbreaks have continued to ravage nursing homes across the nation, undeterred by urgent new safety requirements. Now a nationwide tally by The New York Times has found the number of people living in or connected to nursing homes who have died of the coronavirus to be at least 7,000, far higher than previously known.
In New Jersey, 17 bodies piled up in a nursing home morgue, and more than a quarter of a Virginia home’s residents have died. At least 24 people at a facility in Maryland have died; more than 100 residents and workers have been infected at another in Kansas; and people have died in centers for military veterans in Florida, Nevada, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington.
On Friday, New York officials for the first time disclosed the names of 72 long-term care facilities that have had five or more deaths, including the Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn where 55 people have died.
Cleaners entered the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash., last month. The death of residents in late February at the facility was a first warning of the devastation the coronavirus could wreak inside an American nursing home. (The New York Times)
At least 14 nursing homes in New York City and its suburbs have recorded more than 25 coronavirus-related deaths.
In New Jersey, officials revealed that infections have broken out in 394 long-term facilities — almost two-thirds of the state’s homes — and that more than 1,500 deaths were tied to nursing facilities.
Overall, about a fifth of deaths from the virus in the United States have been tied to nursing homes or other long-term care facilities, the Times review of cases shows. And more than 36,500 residents and employees across the nation have contracted it.
“They’re death pits,” said Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York who founded the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, an education campaign aimed at stopping hospital-acquired infections.
The virus is known to be more deadly to aging, immune-compromised people, and small, confined settings like nursing homes, where workers frequently move from one room to the next, are particularly vulnerable to spreading infection. But oversights and failures also have contributed to the crisis.
The US has the most COVID-19 cases of any country with more than 690,000 and the most fatalities with at least 35,000, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.
The global case tally for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has climbed to 2.2 million. The death toll rose to more than 150,000.
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