Nursing home residents demonstrate
We’ve been seeing some demonstrations lately from groups who don’t usually go that route. First, Chasidic Jews, and now Colorado nursing home residents:
Waving signs that read such things as “I’d rather die of COVID than loneliness,” and “We are prisoners in our home,” residents of one nursing facility staged their own anti-lockdown protest along one of the busiest streets in Greeley, directly across the street from the city’s largest and longest operating hospital.
“Freedom, freedom, freedom,” one lady chanted while waving a sign that read “we want our families back.”
The protest against the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) and Gov. Jared Polis’ mandates that do not allow nursing home residents to see their loved ones, was thought up, organized and carried out by the residents, with oversight from their nurses and other staff members, said the Assistant Administrator of Fairacres Manor Ben Gonzales.
Good for them.
I have long felt that this is one of the cruelest of the many cruel “protective” measures set by certain states in response to COVID. The first month or two of the pandemic, I could see why it was done. But once we learned more about the disease, and as time went on and the effects of prolonged isolation of the elderly and ill would become more serious, it has become more and more important to allow visits. Surely some sort of distancing and hand-washing and all the rest can be instituted without too many ill effects?
I don’t say it’s not a problem, because the nursing home population is especially at risk. But if someone is saying “I’d rather die of COVID than loneliness,” shouldn’t their wishes matter? The problem is that they live in a group facility with other people who perhaps would rather die of loneliness than COVID, and visitors increase everyone’s risk of COVID at least somewhat.
This hateful disease has had so many terrible repercussions. One of them appears to have been the strengthening of the hand of the left against liberty. I hope we can escape that grip.
Not just nursing homes but maybe even worse are assisted living communities. In these places the residents are often still very sharp mentally and also quite independent (many still drive). But in WA anyway they are treated just like nursing homes.
I could go on and on about what my mom has had to endure for over 7 months now and the ever changing and often non sensical policies that her facility has had in place.
We had to take away all that they valued in life to save their lives. Liberal logic from Olympia. Something about hell and good intentions, I question their intentions.
What makes life worth living and who decides? The idea that lockdowns are effective and acceptable is the real Chinese virus.
om,
Yep. No visitors were allowed until early September and are now being limited again. Her facility never even tested ANYONE until mid September(all negative). After four months of virtually never leaving the room they allowed some group meals with one person at a table in a big room. For about five months if residents left for more than a few hours they could not return at all. After about four months they suddenly stopped allowing families to wave through the windows at residents.
My mom is physically about the same but mentally she has her days of being more confused. Nothing real concerning yet but still. It’s all about the lack of face to face human interaction.
Like I said I could go on and on about this. Cruel is putting it mildly.
There was the case in May where the nursing home staff — Washington State, perhaps? UK. or New York? — simply decided to move into the home for an entire five or six or eight week lockdown period.
The decision to do so was made simply because it was simpler, safer, and easier to go into isolation jointly, care-staff together with residents. And the care workers liked their aged residents enough to agree to do it, despite leaving families and children uncared for at home.
That’s true heroic commitment. And it succeeded to protect everyone.
I’m not sure such measures are called for, now that more about this virus transmission is known.
Sometimes the problem of Super-Spreading events, typically with indoor performance spewing, is more mechanical and preventable.
Other Covid-19 viral infection qualities make it difficult to prevent transmission completely.
For example, people vary in the ability to fight it, immunologically. T-cells need training by an infectious agent and retain a kind of “memory” that helps the immune system to stay primed to defeat another one. But it does not remember having done so for long.
I’m 72 suffering with Congestive Heart Failure. While I take reasonable care when I go out, I still go out. I’m not interested looking at the four walls of my home while I die from CHF. Get out and enjoy what’s left. That’s my motto
TJ,
If memory serves, that happened in France.
The game of life is not scored by the total number of seconds spent converting oxygen. People lose sight of that.
sept.26, 2020
CDC COVID-19 Survival Rates
Age 0-19 — 99.997%
Age 20-49 — 99.98%
Age 50-69 — 99.5%
Age 70+ — 94.6%
Griffin:
I’m sorry your mom and your family are still going through such a horrible loss of contact. The rule about waving through the window isn’t just cruel, it’s bizarrely cruel. Your mother must be very strong to have held it together through so many months of isolation.
Geoffrey Britain:
I’ve seen those figures before, but there’s a lot of further information I’d like to have. For example, “over 70” is not a single group, although it’s almost always reported that way. The 70-75-year-olds have a very different rate of survival than the 95-year olds. And a healthy 95-year-old would have a different chance of survival than a debilitated and already-ill nursing home patient of 95. I’ve never seen a site that gave that sort of breakdown.
Neo,
The window rule was particularly stupid. It didn’t affect her because her apartment is in the inner courtyard but for others it was a blow. Something about people getting too close to the building and residents touching glass. Just dumb.
Since September they have allowed them to leave and return so she visited us for a weekend and also my sister but who knows when they’ll shut that down. Lots and lots of phone calls is the thing now because she has a tendency to sleep the day away from boredom and that is when the confusion shows up.
It’s caused much consternation among us all. Don’t know what the answer is but this is just wrong.
It’s insane how once Covid was politicized, any logic to its response, and any desire to end the restrictions went away for large swathes of the population. On the evening of President Trump’s release from the hospital, my husband’s lefty relatives sent an email cancelling their August 2021 family reunion. Message: don’t take heart. My 96 year old mother-in-law, who has dementia, has been rapidly declining under a lockdown imposed by my husband’s brother. She lives in her own apartment, with round the clock “carers” from an agency, plus a housekeeper. Despite the fact that these “carers” care for many people, probably live in large family groups (it’s Los Angeles), and may use public transportation to get to her, the brother has banned all other visitors, and she can’t set foot outside the apartment. The visitor ban would perhaps suitable for long-term care facilities where any carrier would infect the whole population, but to ban her family from seeing her at all in her last days when this is not the case is just incredibly cruel.
The stupidity, the cruelty, it’s horrible.
(And yes, the brother could be defied, but then there’s an ugly scene at the end of Mom’s life. It’s under consideration).
I don’t blame them for protesting. A good friend of mine lost two elderly people, a grandmother and grand aunt, in his family to COVID. Just a couple of weeks apart. In both cases those two women died “alone.” Sure they had staff nearby – dressed in protection gear; but, family was not allowed in the room. Not even allowed in the facility!
While I get that the facility was just trying to be safe (more like trying to avoid a lawsuit, in my opinion) I thought it was cruel to the family who waited outside in the parking lot. More importantly, it was also very cruel to the two elderly women who may have been wondering why their family didn’t come to visit.
Somewhat related to this is the hospital situation. My mom has made it very clear that she does not want to go to the hospital PERIOD. My brother in law had to go in to the hospital a couple months ago for a non life threatening problem but they needed to monitor him and he was in there for about a week and my sister said goodbye to him at the door and didn’t see him again until he was discharged. But he was mentally fine and had his phone and iPad so it wasn’t a terrible situation.
My mom is terrified of this and honestly we are too. The idea of her trying to communicate and make decisions with doctors on her own is concerning to say the least.
An example of how we have made COVID the only medical condition we actually care about. That is very messed up.
Griffin:
Well, I’m glad they finally let her out for a weekend. That is so extra-hard on the elderly, to be alone like that day after day, in a little apartment. Social interaction with loved ones, and activities that put some variety into the day, are so incredibly important.
Had a conversation recently with a person who….was kind of a safety competitor. She looked down upon those who didn’t do the stupid stuff because….she needed to look down on somebody. I think she’d be happier if this never goes away.
Greeley is the county seat of Weld, which has a pretty good Covid dashboard.
https://www.weldgov.com/departments/health_and_environment/2019_novel_coronavirus/covid19_data
It was in the news earlier this year because of infections and deaths in the meat-packing plants that are its economic base, but the total number of deaths in the county to date is 99.
This site says the total is 152. Just goes to show that Science ain’t what’s driving this locomotive.
https://weather.com/coronavirus/l/Greeley+CO?canonicalCityId=50940c104e845057ba77c40a43e8aa3bfaec742caa91cd425baba01a3fb582ed
Sure enough, the county’s site has this note, if you mouse over the stat box:
“Note: This number is the number of fatalities due to COVID-19 since March 16th, 2020 with a positive RT-PCR test. These fatalities have been certified by the Weld County Coroner that the death was due to COVID-19. This number does not indicate the number of deaths among COVID-19 cases (those who had COVID-19 but may have died from a different cause than COVID-19). ”
Here’s more news from Colorado on other peaceful protesters, formerly known as church members. The story is actually about a group in Teller county, down by Colorado Springs.
https://www.greeleytribune.com/2020/10/06/andrew-wommack-ministries-lawsuit-coronavirus-polis-restrictions-gatherings/
BTW, this story has one of the worst headlines I have ever tried to decipher.
I am also angry about the delays of cancer treatment and other forms of medical treatment. No one is counting the number of deaths that resulted from these delays.
THe disease has no hate, Neo. It is a test for humanity. Some will fail, others will pass.
These American concentration camps are why I do not jump on the “home of the brave and free” band wagon these days.
The whole “Trump gonna save us all” shtick pumped here in 2015 or 2016, is especially ironic given what I wrote at the time.
Trump has surpassed the first Assassin’s bullet, but what about the second or third one?
And who saved your mommas and grandmothers in America’s concentration death camps?
People don’t even know who they are reading or conversing with here. The ignorance is absolutely astounding in humanity.
There will be no Saviors or Salvation for humanity. No Yeshua deus ex machina solution. You humans gonna have to actually do the work yourselves and not rely on a Trump or some god figure to do it for you.
This is the Test. Pass or fail, does not matter at this point.
Why is it predominantly people on the right who point out that COVID isn’t the only medical condition out there? That COVID restrictions could delay detection and treatment of other diseases? That loneliness and isolation are in and of themselves extremely unhealthy, and have been empirically demonstrated to take years off people’s lives? Why are we the ones who’ve been pointing all this out since March? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who don’t know how to think? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who don’t care about reason or science? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who lack empathy and compassion?
There’s no point in posing these questions to leftists. They’re too far gone. Logic is just a Western colonialist invention to them. But I’d like to pose these questions to people on the fence.
Shadow. As I mentioned earlier, there are issues with some of these folks, including a sneaking, possibly unconscious, gratification at seeing people made to do stupid stuff by Authority. Being ostentatiously “safe” or “safer” than others is cool, too.
Nobody wants to feel they have no control over serious matters. Doing something, anything, or something some important figures claim will help, is attractive as opposed to going through life waiting for the next random hit. Let’s say people on the left are less likely to feel sanguine about the latter way of going through life. Empathy and compassion are not for the afflicted unless the afflicted are in a designated worthy group. And being in a designated worthy group, empathy and compassion are owed, even if they’re not afflicted.
Talking to a woman who’s in a class reading “White Fragility” . Nope, facts and logic don’t work in a time of “Awful America”. Should say my own church has a class on “America’s Original Sin” by Wallis. So I mentioned median household income by ethnic group. If we’re such a racist country, how some so many other groups are doing better than whites? She looked confused but you could see her marshalling defenses.
I’m old enough to have found the world full of mush heads, but the supply seems to have increased in the last, say, twenty years.
The concept of people on the fence doesn’t seem applicable. If you had the capacity to have a clue, you wouldn’t need questions posed. The real world would be obvious.
Ymarsakar:
“Trump gonna save us all” was not pumped here in 2015-2016, or really at any other time. But especially not when he was a candidate. There may have been a commenter or two with that attitude – I don’t recall and cannot account for every comment – but this is certainly not a blog that was giving off that message.
Nor is it being pumped now, not by me or by anyone else. It’s more like “if Trump is elected it may buy us a little time, at best. Either way it will be very very tough.”
Another tragic consequence of the lockdown mentality is the fact that people can no longer have traditional funerals. I don’t know about the rest of you but in my neck of the woods at least half a dozen of my very close friends have had a parent die this year – – we’re all in our late 60’s now so death has become a common and expected occurrence among those in our parents’ generation – – but there have been no big funerals or wakes at which old friends and extended family can meet and celebrate the life of a good friend’s father or mother (and reinforce and renew lifelong friendships). It’s frustrating and very depressing. And it should end.
– Carl
The stupidity, the cruelty, it’s horrible.
Take a good look at humanity, humanity.
https://www.westernjournal.com/exclusive-gen-flynn-dont-act-2-people-control-98/
Fair warning, leave fast for those that can’t handle Ymar conspiracies that turn out to be true
https://www.westernjournal.com/exclusive-gen-flynn-forces-evil-want-steal-freedom-dark-night-god-stands-us/
https://www.westernjournal.com/exclusive-gen-flynn-letter-america/
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1270842639903006720?lang=en
Deaths from Alzheimer’s and dementia were 20% higher than normal over the summer, and they continue to exceed normal levels.