Telling the story behind the statistic

My stepmother died at a Florida nursing home on April 9. She was 94 and suffering from an assortment of maladies. She had end-stage celebral atherosclerosis. She was blind and bedridden and very weak.

It was coronavirus that dealt the final blow.

Our family didn't know it at the time. Her obituary said nothing about coronavirus because nobody knew she was yet another COVID-19 casualty. The nursing home, the Opis Coquina Center in Ormond Beach, Fla., said nothing. It was only through the efforts of the Daytona Beach News-Journal and other Florida papers that the medical examiner's office issued the names of those in nursing homes diagnosed, mostly post-mortem, with COVID-19.

This is from an April 20 article in the News-Journal by Nikki Ross:

Constance Shay, 94, was an Ormond Beach woman with coronavirus, who died of end stage cerebral atherosclerosis on April 9 at Opis Coquina Center, a nursing home in Ormond Beach, according to the Volusia County Medical Examiner’s report. 

Her medical history includes coronavirus, vascular dementia, hypertension, GERD and atherosclerosis. 

Since Shay resided at Opis Coquina Center, which has an active COVID-19 outbreak, her cremation was flagged. She was swabbed for COVID-19. 

She’d been a patient of the nursing home since 2016. Over the years her health declined and by February 2018 she was unable to care for herself or make decisions, and she had lost a significant amount of weight. She was placed in hospice. 

Her death is not included on the Florida Department of Health’s list of coronavirus related deaths.

The newspaper article was the first time that any of us, including my Florida siblings, knew about this. The newspapers dug deep to get this info and find out that the many of the Central Florida nursing home deaths were not included in the state's count of coronavirus-related fatalities. This is crucial because Florida is one of those states accused of undercounting the death count for political reasons. The Florida Office of Health reported this morning that more than 40,000 in the state have tested positive and 1,735 have died.

Today's New York Times had this:

While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to COVID-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities. 

At least 28,100 patients and workers have died at nursing homes and long-term care facilities for the elderly.

None of this tells us who Constance Shay was as a person. She was Connie to us. She and my dad married in 1992. Both had lost spouses. My father had been devastated by my mom's death of ovarian cancer in 1986. The CPA was keeping busy doing people's taxes when he dropped by Connie's house to square her with the IRS. One thing led to another and they got married and stayed that way until my father died of prostate cancer in 2002. Connie stayed in Ormond Beach and eventually sold her house and moved into a long-term care facility. The last time I visited from Wyoming she had lost most of her sight. My sister and brother-in-law came over from Winter Park to visit and chat and read to her. She had other visitors from the family that remains in Florida, which is quite a crowd.

Connie was a lifelong Catholic like my father and they attended mass together every Sunday. One of their hobbies was tending to the flower gardens at St. Brendan Catholic Church, the same place Chris and I were married in 1982. They also had a verdant garden at their home. They both read a lot.

They are both gone now. I don't know if I will one day meet with them in heaven because I am no longer certain there is such a place. But I do know that we are made of stardust that will be floating around the heavens for eternity. We will run into each other somewhere in the cosmos. I hope to tell my birth mother and my father that we found a cure for cancer at long last. I hope to tell Connie that nobody ever died alone again and had the real cause of their death printed 11 days later in the morning paper.