On 6 January 2022, Connecticut's top public health official Manisha Juthani issued guidance requesting nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients from Connecticut hospitals to free up their bed space. While similar to Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, the Lamont adminstration's guidance differs in not forcing Connecticut's nursing homes to admit these potentially contagious patients into their facilities, which like New York, house those most at risk of death if exposed to the variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
Connecticut reports COVID data related to nursing homes on a two-week cycle. The following report is from Friday, 21 January 2022, which would cover the period from when the Lamont administration's guidance was first issued. We're presenting this report because it provides information about the levels and trends for both COVID cases and deaths at Connecticut nursing homes.
- CT Nursing Home COVID Infections and Deaths Are On The Rise
-
Let's go straight to an excerpt from the report:
Among the general and otherwise healthy population of Connecticut, coronavirus-related hospitalizations and infections continue to decline. It's a different story inside nursing homes.
In the latest report from the Connecticut Department of Public Health, the number of cases among nursing home residents have nearly doubled from 829 to 1,616 in the past two weeks. Deaths have more than quadrupled, from 13 to 53, in the same period.
But when it comes to vaccine booster shots, the facilities haven't kept pace, according to the governor. Less than 80 percent of the residents have received their third shot, Lamont said, and only around a third have been boostered. That, despite an executive order signed by the governor in January mandating the third jab.
On Wednesday, Lamont issued another order, requiring all nursing home visitors to either show proof that they have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or have recently tested negative for the virus in order to enter the facilities, beginning Saturday.
We find the numbers to be rather stunning.
What is not known at this time is how many COVID-positive patients might have been transferred from Connecticut hospitals to nursing homes during this period. It's quite possible the answer to that question is zero, and if that's the case, the state's data for COVID nursing home cases and deaths confirms how incredibly bad these facilities are at containing the spread of coronavirus infections. That information would put the Lamont administration's guidance into a different light which, in our view, could constitute flat-out medical malpractice.
But what is the answer to the question of how many COVID-positive patients were transferred from hospitals to Connecticut nursing homes in each day since the Lamont administration's bizarre guidance was issued?
