A friend in the US writes;
When I heard the first deaths in the US from Covid-19 were at a nursing home, it wasn’t really surprising, even if they were 3,000 miles away from where I work in the Washington DC metro area. I travel to nursing homes throughout the region, have done so for years. The biggest health care trend I’ve seen recently doesn’t have to do with insurance, it has to do with staffing.
Staffing in nursing homes has always been a problem. It’s a struggle for the companies who own them to make what they need to survive, considering the low reimbursement rates from Medicare and Medicaid. Populations are getting older, and living longer with chronic disease primarily caused by lifestyle choices and improved treatments targeting them (and lack of improved health habits, but that’s another subject). As the nursing home population grows, so does the demand for affordable staff. With increasing government regulation and rising costs to treat chronic disease, nursing homes must do more with less money to address the situation.
The nursing home industry has responded by hiring thousands and thousands of Africans, from Ghana, Cameroon, and other African nations as nursing home aides. These workers are trained and transplanted to the US, where their tolerance for hard work and little money has displaced the traditional American health care worker. There has also been a trickle-up, where growing numbers of registered nurses and nurse practitioners are also Africans, displacing native Americans and bringing down salaries in those fields.
What does this have to do with Covid-19? Every day when I am in nursing homes, I overhear staff talking fondly about family, going back to Africa to visit. Many make at least annual treks back to visit, some twice per year. I have also heard talk that they do not believe that Covid-19 can exist in equatorial Africa, so they feel they immune to the disease while there, and they do not believe they can bring it back to America. I’ve talked to them about this, and have yet to convince anyone that infection is possible. They do not talk about the Chinese, who with their Belt and Road Initiative have made substantial inroads into Africa. No one really knows the extent of Covid-19 in the African continent spread by thousands of Chinese workers, but it is ignorant to ignore this route as not significant for viral spread.
It will be interesting to see if the truth ever comes out about how Covid-19 truly got into Seattle-area nursing homes. I believe it’s a matter of time before the virus settles into nursing homes in every large metro area. Just wait and see.
Coronophobia the newest ‘Hate Crime’.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/covid19-coronavirus-first-death-bc-canada-1.5483932.
Watch it shoot round the care homes
A health-care worker that doesn’t believe in basic hygiene or the concept of “contagious” is no real health-care worker. And yes, I’m aware how much that sounds like the “No true Scotsman” fallacy. 🙂
“No true Shithole dweller believes they live in a Shithole”, e.g. Toronto.
Then there’s the fact that nursing homes don’t spend much on cleaning…
… nor do hospitals… [shudder]…
Maybe some nursing homes but my mom was in two in Calgary, one low care and one very high care and both were very clean and the staff was excellent. These weren’t cheap nursing homes and so that is likely why they were good.
Now the big problem with staff was in Canada it seems there are huge numbers of Fillipino nursing aids and their accents were very difficult for an old, almost deaf person to understand.
I saw the same thing in Foothills Hosp this past week…had some piping retrofits done to to my pump. The majority of the NA’s were Fillipino’s but there was also a smattering of Fillipino’s that were full on NUrses with some having 30-40 yrs experience from around the world. Communicaing with them was not an issue whatsoever.
Overall the care from 94 (CV ICU) to 91 was EXCELLENT.
6 days from opening me up to discharge.
Cleanliness was not an issue whatsoever….
Food..?? We won’t go there.
I would say our Hospitals biggest issue in the coming months will be the MILLIONS of single use plastics they go through. Needles – IV Bags – hoses clamps etc, that may become scarce due to supply limitations.
Rockyview, Foothills, South Campus and Lougheed since 2001. Stay away from Lougheed unless you need to see a Vascular Surgeon. The Vascular folks are top notch and the ER folks are great, general staff a few good women, the rest….meh. I do Foothills (Tom Baker) every two weeks. Clean and the staff I deal with are top notch. Rockywiew is old and a bit cramped but has great staff, all levels. Did all my surgeries there. The surgical staff I dealt with were a real hoot. When I started at South Campus (I can see it from the dining room widow) I swear I was the only patient in the place, it was that new. Clean. Still. They’ll take you early if you are early for scans.
I’m wondering if dying from Coronavirus is a feature, not a bug.
Back in the fall during the election campaign, a co-worker, who is stridently left-wing, said that we need all the old people to die off cause that’s who votes for conservatives.
Well, here we are. How often do we hear there’s nothing to worry about? The Coronavirus is only dangerous to those with pre-conditions and the elderly.
Oh okay then, its only our parents and grandparents who will be fatally affected. No big deal.
Perhaps thats a tad conspiratoriol, but I’m glad my grandfather lives at home.
heyo John.
I got news for your leftoidal co-worker.
come my time, instead of conveniently dying after my whole estate is wasted on a useless comatose,
my contingency plan is, ummm, ‘taking as many of them with me as possible’.
Every time I see these whiny progressive nurses (and teachers) bemoan their 100K salaries and benefits with constant strikes and walkouts, I say replace them all with Third World labour.
We’re headed there anyway, why let them benefit from the fallout until retirement.
American health care workers were always ready to work hard for little money.
The real problem is that their employers consider it morally wrong to pay a white person who isn’t a lawyer with an Ivy League degree a living wage. They will hire literally anybody else.
Even if that person is too stupid to understand that it is unsanitary to wipe with your left hand.
strapon, you mean like those Kristians in south Korea, who got it going big time down there???
Import turd world become turd world.
And turd world is imported because lazy people want to outscore taking care of their loved ones to the state.
And the state does not want to pay a wage that reflects the value of the service and instead imports turd worlders.
“It will be interesting to see if the truth ever comes out about how Covid-19 truly got into Seattle-area nursing homes. I believe it’s a matter of time before the virus settles into nursing homes in every large metro area. Just wait and see.”
That’s a pretty safe bet.
My Wife was a nurse in the local hospital instead of a nursing home,than god, but she did practicums in nursing in both high priced and government funded homes.There IS a huge difference in the quality, especially in staffing. One of our friends is an LPN who works in a private low priced care home, she looks after 48 patients with two care aides.
Every virus or cold that hits a country hits care homes second only to public schools, and usually with a fairly high rate of mortality, obvious considering the health problems with most of the people living there. So covid-19/corona virus will show up in every care home in the country unless it dies out very soon. The Seattle case is fairly obvious, half of China that visits the USA lands in Seattle first and they have a large Chinese population, much like Vancouver B.C.
The shelves of all the stores are bare of hand sanitizer, toilet paper and face masks. No one has died here yet, so panic hasn’t occurred yet. Going to a public meeting tonite,think I’ll cough a bit and when people ask will reply,” took a charter tour of China a couple of weeks back and picked up this cough,haven’t been able to shake it yet”.
” No one has died here yet”
1st death, Vancouver
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/bc-reports-first-death-due-to-covid-19-in-north-vancouver-care-home/ar-BB10Xp44?li=AAggNb9&ocid=UE07DHP
Put Canada on the board, one death, eight recoveries. Let’s see, how the domestic death and recovery rates develop over time. Expect additions everyday now.
Here is the ultimate: “it is probably nothing” look at # of deaths and # of recoveries by country for each of the places with three hundred or more infections other than China and Iran. Then convince yourself that the official estimates of death rates are accurate. Good luck with that. Those numbers will probably improve, probably by a lot, but as of now not a single country with 300+ infections supports official death rate estimates. Not one.
wanna glimpse of the mindset of a nursing home owner? key word ‘multimillionaire’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Buxbaum
“TOO MANY CORPSES TO CREMATE”
North Korea’s military hit hard by COVID-19 – 3700 soldiers reportedly in Quarantine – Almost 200 soldiers dead.
Who knows what’s happening with the peasant class.
https://www.dailynk.com/english/sources-almost-200-soldiers-have-died-covid-19/
How can government agencies competently calculate the mortality rate of a disease when most people infected just stay home,ride it out and recover,as I have always done. When anyone in my family gets sick, we don’t go running off to a doctor but simply treat the person at home with the usual known practices that ease the person’s distress.
So, you have the flu, and you run off to the doctor or worse yet,the emergency ward where they can do sfa for you,and you probably just passed the wealth around, but you ARE now a statistic! So we have government agencies estimate that we have had for example 10,000 cases, and 140 deaths, but another 50,000 cases were never reported to health authorities. Mortality rate? Who the hell knows?
Just got a phone call an hour ago from a friend who’s spent the past six weeks at sea on a cruise ship. He says to come and visit after he recovers from a high fever, sore throat and cough. My ex-nurse wife told him to see a doctor and get tested,but the stubborn old bugger refuses to do so. We are going to call his son and see what can be done. He just might have the goddamned thing, or maybe NOT, but we’ll never know if we can’t get him to visit his doctor.
My mother was in a nursing home for a short while, that happened to be in the DC area, but I have zero doubt that this kind of stuff happens everywhere. A favorite trick of the staff, if you left your loved one unattended at night, this happened to us and to the elderly woman in the other bed. They like to put the call bell out of reach of the patients. The people next bed, when they realized this, kept somebody there 24 hours. We took my mother out and brought her home.