Saturday, February 12, 2022

12 February 2022: Opinion - Connecticut's Absurd and Dangerous Cuomo-esque COVID Nursing Home Order

Connecticut’s absurd COVID order endangers nursing home patients — again

This op-ed by Bob Stefanowski, who's running for the Republican nomination for governor in Connecticut, provides a solid recap of the Lamont administration's strange decision to implement a version of New York's Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive as COVID cases peaked in early January 2022.

But he also presents new information about the policy, in which we learn nursing home operators have to justify their decisions to decline admitting COVID-positive patients being dumped out of Connecticut hospitals to free up their bed space, which makes the policy much less voluntary than it has been presented to the public.

Administrators of Connecticut’s 209 nursing homes and long-term care facilities were stunned at the start of this year when the state’s Department of Public Health (DPH) told them they must start accepting patients infected with COVID-19 to relieve pressure on overflowing hospitals.

It was like déjà vu all over again for those who worked in nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic, when deaths from COVID in states like Connecticut, New York and New Jersey were highly concentrated in elderly care facilities.

Despite being one of the most vaccinated groups, people over the age of 65 account for three-quarters of the total deaths from COVID. A combination of close quarters and patients with compromised immune systems made the virus spread like wildfire through nursing homes.

The National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that any state considering “relief health care” facilities, such as nursing homes, must ensure that transferred COVID patients won’t compromise those facilities’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus internally....

While ... Connecticut never stopped allowing infected patients in, most nursing homes required two negative COVID tests at least 24 hours apart before they were willing to accept any new patient or one discharged from a hospital looking to free up capacity.

This all changed with Connecticut’s DPH memo this year, urging nursing homes to take in patients discharged from a hospital “regardless of COVID-19 status.” After pushback from nursing home administrators, a spokesperson for Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont clarified that he was not forcing them to take COVID-positive patients, but they needed to call DPH and explain why if they didn’t.

One medical director at a Connecticut nursing home lamented on social media that “if the hospital makes a referral of a COVID positive person and we decline, we are immediately reported to DPH and have to justify the decision.” Like the bully on the school playground saying — “Go ahead, I double dare you” — only this time lives are at stake.

Stefanowski continues to note that the COVID death toll in Connecticut's nursing homes has increased since the Lamont administration's Cuomo-esque policy has been in effect.

But the one question no-one has yet publicly answered is how many COVID-positive patients have been transferred into Connecticut nursing homes since it went into effect in early January 2022? We would also want to know how many COVID cases were present in the nursing homes to which they were transferred on the date before they were transferred, and how many cases have been detected in each day since.

Meanwhile, the timeline has been following the story since it began. Here's an overview of the major reports to date.

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