Nursing home signs should read: Welcome to the Titanic. There are no lifeboats

I don't always read the AARP Bulletin. It's a good publication with lots of helpful info for retirees like me. But, you know, there are books and the Internet and football and writing and "Queen's Gambit" on Netflix. 

This issue of the Bulletin carried a red banner crying SPECIAL EDITION and below that this header: "Covid-19 & Nursing Homes: An American Tragedy." It grabbed me because my stepmother died of Covid in a Florida long-term care facility. And I have been reading other articles on the subject since March and have been shocked with how many people my own age have died. I am 69 now but next week is my birthday and people in their 70s and 80s with underlying conditions are most vulnerable. I soon will be in that cohort.

This comes from the WyoFile weekly pandemic report, 12/11/20:

The Wyoming DOH has reported 321 Covid-19 deaths. That includes 128 in November, the most of any month so far. Many of these have been related to long-term care facilities. Wyoming now ranks third in the country for its rate of nursing-home-related deaths, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.

So there's that. And this subhead from the Bulletin:

In one of the most devastating health debacles in our nation's history, some 54,000 residents and workers in long-term care facilities died of causes related to the coronavirus within four months of the first known infection.

The article spans the 18 weeks from Feb. 29 and the first death in a Seattle nursing home to June 22. The best things are personal stories of patients, family members and health-care workers. Cami Nedleigh relates the story of her mother, Geneva Wood, a resident of the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash. Wood went into Life Care in late January to recover from a stroke. She was supposed to be released in early March but fell and broke her hip the last week of February. She stayed in Life Care. 

This from Wood: 

My roommate was coughing. Everybody was saying bronchitis. The I got a cough and could barely breathe. Thought it was pneumonia. I remember them saying I had a 102 fever. I guess I didn't know enough to be scared.

And Nedleigh: 

Mom got better, thankfully. She's a tough old Texas broad. But Mom's roommate didn't make it.

The article conjures scenes of chaos and bravery. In the first week of March, 27 of 108 residents and 25 of the 180 staff had the virus. And nobody really knew what it was and how to treat it. This led to many deaths.

Timothy Killian (Life Care spokesman): We all grew up with these movies about pandemics, in which the government vans swoop in and take control. As the situation escalated and the facility went into lockdown and people started dying. I kept expecting some type of coordinated response, but we saw nothing of that nature.

The facility, of course, gets some of the blame. Killian had obviously seen "Contagion" and "Outbreak." In the latter film, a monkey has the virus and ends up in a California small-town pet shop and starts spreading the virus. The commanding general of the national response team won't act because he knows the virus came from an Army bioweapons lab. Epidemiologists Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo sneak into the site and start doing their good deeds while the evil general (the usually heroic Morgan Freeman) makes plans to seal off the town and bomb it to destroy the evidence. The most memorable scene takes place in the town's packed movie theater. A virus carrier coughs and we see spit flying around the room in slow motion, landing in people's mouths. Aw hell no, you might say. And you'd be right. 

It hits a bit close to home. Covid carriers were still going to movies in March and spreading the virus to seatmates. Asymptomatic carriers were going out to crowded bars and attending parties. The virus was in pandemic heaven, latching on to many new human hosts and spreading which is what viruses do.

You can read parts of the Bulletin story at the AARP web site. Kudos to David Hochman and contributors for the story. It appears just as the FDA approves the Pfizer vaccine and hope emerges. That doesn't help the many dead and dying in the U.S., almost 300,000 at last count, with a 16 percent fatality rate in long-term facilities. Compare this to the total U.S. fatality rate is 2.3 percent. 

This final quote is from Judith Regan, a publishing executive whose father, Leo Regan, is a resident of the Long Island State Veterans Home, site of 32 deaths:

The residents and staff are being led to slaughter. He is on the Titanic, but there are no lifeboats.