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.

MYOB: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wants to outlaw same-day voter registration in all of the "W" states

Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wants to end same-day voter registration in every state. Wyoming, of course, has same-day voter registration and it has been extremely popular and effective in electing a Republican majority to the legislature, an all-Republican Congressional delegation and an occasional Democratic governor. All of us who have worked the polls know that anyone who shows up to register is shown to a separate registration table staffed by paid volunteers who have attended at least one training session held by the county clerk's office. This time-tested system is apparently not good enough for Scott Walker:

"States across the country that have same-day registration have real problems because the vast majority of their states have poll workers who are wonderful volunteers, who work 13-hour days and who in most cases are retirees," Walker said in the speech. "It's difficult for them to handle the volume of people who come at the last minute. It'd be much better if registration was done in advance of election day. It'd be easier for our clerks to handle that. All that needs to be done."

Forget Mr. Walker's ageism. Forget his stereotyping of poll workers as "retirees" whose feeble minds are apparently unable to keep track of voters. Those voting days can be long and tedious, punctuated by an occasional long line and a tough question about eligibility or voting protocol. In Wyoming, poll workers can work half-day shifts, an option brought to you by legislation sponsored and ramrodded by one-time Democratic Rep. Lori Millin. In 2010, I worked one of those split-shifts while most of my fellow volunteers did not. They were tougher than I am. Maybe they wanted to stay on-site and hobnob with old friends, or maybe they wanted to eat more of Edith's yummy tamales (we eat well at the polls), or maybe they just like what they're doing and are damned good at it. Whatever the reason, a more hard-working bunch you will never see.

Perhaps Gov. Walker actually believes that Wisconsin poll workers are inferior to those in Wyoming. Perhaps we need a poll-worker Olympics to find out who is the best of them all.

Or perhaps Gov. Walker is just full of it. Didn't the Repubs learn anything from the recent election? Americans don't like it when you trample on their voting rights.