FYI , I’m currently home and recovering after minor surgery in this time of COVID-19 lockdown. The highlight of yesterday was a call from the hospital telling me that I had been exposed to someone who tested positive with the virus – presumably a staffer who interacted with me the previous week. I had been interacting cautiously with people since my release last Saturday, including a visit to another health care provider, so they needed to be notified. When I was in hospital, I had asked about getting tested, and they put me off. This is not working. They should be testing everybody, and they’re not even testing the most likely carriers.

What’s most concerning, though, is the toll this is very likely taking among the most vulnerable, particularly residents of nursing homes. I don’t know about how these homes are run in other communities. What I can say, based on personal experience, is that in my neck of the woods, people in nursing homes die all the time of respiratory illness. When my mom was in an institution, it seemed clear that the expectation was that she would just get ill and die one day, and that there wasn’t much they were going to do about it. The times my mom got seriously ill, we pulled her out and put her in the hospital for proper care, which she got. But other folks with less attentive families who would catch the viruses that regularly rip through those places like the angel of death would just expire in their rooms without fanfare. From what I could see, neither the required skills, nor technologies, nor effort would be put into saving them. One day, they would just be gone.

In the context of that reality, I just can’t imagine how many of these folks are being lost to COVID. Would we even know? Do they differentiate between the Coronavirus and other respiratory illnesses, once an elderly resident is dead? When this started showing up in residential facilities it struck me that there might be a great many silent victims of this pandemic, and thus far I haven’t seen convincing evidence that something like this isn’t happening. We are hearing about documented losses in various communities across the country, but this could be a dramatic under count. As of April 18, 3,400 nursing home residents in New York had died of COVID-19. They are perhaps making an extra effort to track these in certain communities, but I doubt that’s happening everywhere. When I picture my mother’s mean accommodations – a dorm-room size compartment, curtain down the middle to separate two beds, shared bathroom and closet space, very little social distance. That at the cost of $90,000 a year and up.

The cost of this pandemic is enormous. We could have prevented it if we had taken the threat seriously. We didn’t, thanks in large measure to the reality television star in the White House, but also thanks to flaccid protections prior to his tenure that were easily undone by legislators and administration hacks bent on deconstructing the administrative state. Accountability? We shall see.

luv u,

jp