Herstory Begins Now posted:

Minorities?

Gumball Gumption posted:

If you trust any states numbers

Willa Rogers posted:

Yeah, I almost pointed out how paid-leave-less workers who were economically compelled to deliver groceries & meals to work-at-home PMC (or who pick food in the fields, or who live in prison) were victimized as well.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of this country's deaths happened among these two groups, don't you agree?

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

I think Colorado has been pretty decent. Why do we need to distrust all data suddenly?

Herstory Begins Now posted:

In the future you should probably actually point that out instead of 'almost pointed it out'

quote:

As coronavirus deaths increased exponentially in elder care centers, Gov. Ron DeSantis took a victory lap.

Along with fawning state officials and industry leaders, he touted at a May 13 news conference that his actions prevented a catastrophe at nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

The Republican governor said he always knew and acted decisively at the beginning to protect “the most vulnerable population,” who he calls “the tip of the spear” for the pandemic in Florida.

But DeSantis’ “whack-a-mole” approach to long-term care facilities in the pandemic — as the AARP calls it — has failed.

Despite the proclamations, DeSantis didn’t promptly identify outbreaks in elder care facilities and is now scrambling to stem the tide of cases and deaths, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.

Florida National Guard strike teams dispatched by DeSantis last month to test at nursing homes proved to be nothing more than a flyswatter against a viral swarm.

COVID-19 fatalities linked to elder care centers comprise nearly half of the deaths in Florida and the percentage rises every day. Yet nursing homes and ALF residents and staff comprise only 2% of the state’s population.

Between April and May, the death toll at nursing homes and ALFs increased nearly 600%. By Sunday, COVID-19 deaths of residents and staff stood at 1,076, which is 48% of the state’s total 2,237 fatalities, according to the Department of Health.

Mary Mayhew, secretary for the Agency for Health Care Administration, said back on March 16 that “timely testing for our elderly and medically frail is mission critical.”

But it took a month after the first Florida cases bubbled up on March 1 before the administration even tried to get a grip on outbreaks by ordering elder care homes to report their COVID-19 cases to the state.

At least five other states have mandated testing of all seniors, as well as staffers, but DeSantis has no plans to do both presently. His administration asked facilities only two weeks ago how many staffers needed testing.

“It’s AARP’s view that we can do a lot better,” said Jeff Johnson, the state director for Florida.

“If you look at the fatalities, we have seen a significant decrease in the impact everywhere but long-term care facilities — and an explosion in long-term care facilities.”

Governor backs off ‘surveillance testing’

After saying he would conduct only “surveillance testing” at facilities, DeSantis changed course last week and will at least partly try to adhere to federal guidelines by testing all staffers over the next two weeks, The Post has learned.

Beyond that it wasn’t until this month that DeSantis made basic infection containment, like isolating COVID-positive residents, a requirement, not a suggestion.

He ordered elder care centers two weeks ago to isolate them or ship them out to hospitals or another home without cases.

Also last week, he announced a Jacksonville nursing home that hadn’t opened yet would take COVID-19 patients who can’t be isolated in their current facilities.

DeSantis has trumpeted that he avoided the avalanche of deaths like in New York and New Jersey because he prohibited hospitals from transferring positive cases back to facilities. But he didn’t ban the practice until May 5.

DeSantis said at his May 13 news conference that 32,000 residents and staffers had been tested by the Florida National Guard. An estimated 355,000 people live and work at nursing homes and ALFs in Florida.

By DeSantis’ own figure, that is less than 10 percent tested.

The National Guard did not answer questions on the scope of its testing operation, and the governor’s spokeswoman didn’t answer repeated requests for comment.

Kathryn Hyer, director of the Florida Policy Exchange Center on Aging at the University of South Florida, lauded DeSantis’ efforts in closing down visitation to elder care centers. But when asked whether DeSantis did enough early on, she said, “That’s a really tough question.”

“The real problem they had was with the National Guard doing testing, and it was taking 10 days to get results back,” she said. “The issue remains testing.”

DeSantis said May 13 that the state had plenty of test kits, but that it was beyond the capacity of the National Guard to test all residents and staff. He encouraged the workers to go to a drive-up testing site on their own and for facilities to test on their own with supplies from the state.

That is when DeSantis said he favored “surveillance” testing, taking samples of staffers and workers at randomly chosen facilities.

“You're not testing everyone when you’re doing surveillance,” DeSantis said. “You’re trying to test representative samples and figure out if we see any flare-ups in any of these facilities.”

But two expert government health agencies say that all staff and residents need to be tested. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services also recommend testing regularly.

It’s only been in the past two weeks that the governor ordered all staffers at the state’s roughly 4,400 nursing homes and ALFs to submit to tests. Until mid-May, testing had been voluntary for staffers, and it remains so for residents.

Repeatedly, it has been the much-maligned elder care industry still reeling from the fallout of 12 heat-related deaths at a South Florida facility in the wake of Hurricane Irma in 2017 to take the lead.

It was the industry that pushed for DeSantis to fix his error-prone, bare-bones list of facilities with COVID cases. The list was released April 26 under legal threat by news outlets, including Gannett, which owns The Post.

Individual nursing homes and ALFs refused to take positive COVID patients back from hospitals, industry sources told the Post.

Again, DeSantis didn’t order hospitals to stop until May 5. Elder care groups and advocates also told The Post this was also the first time the state officially banned the practice.

Now, DeSantis plans to test all of the roughly 200,000 staffers in the next two weeks, the Florida Health Care Association told The Post last Wednesday.

And it’s the industry again who will help him meet that mandate of the federal government. But the recommendation to governors by Trump’s coronavirus task force was that all residents at facilities be tested, as well.

The association told The Post on Wednesday that the testing of staffers will come from a combination of nursing homes and ALFs testing on their own, staffers visiting drive-up sites and the National Guard. Several of the other states do it that way and some rely entirely on the elder care centers.

“The governor does have the plan to meet that goal in long-term care facilities in the next two weeks,” said Kristen Knapp, spokeswoman for the association. “I would say there has been a collaboration.”

The AARP’s Johnson is empathetic to the task confronting DeSantis and state health officials. Like many governors working without a coordinated national response, DeSantis was forced to go to the open market to obtain tests.

“They have been doing everything they can think of to do, but it hasn’t been enough,” he said.

“Until you can get to the point that you can test everybody before they walk in the door and know whether they carry the virus, you are always going to be playing whack-a-mole.”

In the month leading up to the state’s canvass for cases on April 1, deaths in long-term care were clustered in geographic areas — the majority in Broward County and more than one in Duval.

Since that time, the problem has spread around the state, with 28 deaths at Fair Havens Center in Miami-Dade, 25 at Seminole Pavilion Rehabilitation in Pinellas County, 22 at both the Bristol at Tampa nursing center in Hillsborough County and Coquina Center in Volusia County, and 22 at Highlands Lake Center in Polk.

In all, as of Sunday, state health officials are reporting 29 long-term care facilities with death totals that have reached double figures.

The stakes go beyond the confines of the nursing home or assisted living facility. Staff members go in and out of facilities, and without finding and containing their infections, the virus can easily spread to the community.

‘Headlines so frustrating’

At this point, the long-term care industry is punch drunk from the bevy of news reports about the rising number of deaths and homes with significant outbreaks, as well as the ever-shifting sands of guidance from state and federal authorities.

“The headlines are so frustrating. I want people to know we are working hard,” said Knapp.

Nursing homes and ALFs say they want testing but worry that they will be held liable for any outbreak in a state where 85 percent of COVID-19 fatalities are among the 65-and-older set.

“The more testing you have, there are potential to be positive cases, but I don’t think having a positive case is an admission of failure for a facility,” Knapp said.

At his May 13 news conference, DeSantis touted how fighting the virus infecting Florida’s seniors has been a priority for him and his agencies since the beginning. He cited how he shut down visitation on March 15.

He pointed out how the state has provided personal protective equipment to the tune of 10 million masks, 1 million gloves, more than 500,000 face shields and 160,000 gowns for long-term care workers and how the state has led the way on testing.

But the state didn’t make a concerted effort on testing until mid-April, six weeks after Florida ’s March 1 order declaring a public health emergency.

DeSantis announced on April 13 that he was mobilizing teams from the Florida National Guard to go into nursing homes “proactively” for testing.

Two days later, the state revealed for the first time the death toll in nursing homes — 122.

A month after the launch of strike teams, DeSantis said, 32,000 had been tested.

But it clearly wasn’t enough.

The state’s testing method up until now has not been an effective way to stem the tide of COVID-19 and is of little value, one ALF operator said.

“The testing is going to provide false reassurance to people,” said Deborah Lytle, a registered nurse who owns Amazing Grace Assisted Living Home, which has three residential ALFs in Palm Beach County with six residents apiece.

Lytle favors antibody testing for everyone and a doubling down on infection control.

“Just because you are negative today doesn’t mean you are negative tomorrow,” she said.

The lost month

State officials knew early on that the coronavirus strain was spreading rapid fire through long-term care facilities.

Just one week after visitation ended at nursing homes on March 14, the first 19 cases were disclosed by the state. In five days, they had doubled.

The deaths began after a 77-year-old man living at Atria Willow Wood Senior Living in Fort Lauderdale went to the hospital with flu-like symptoms — fever and shortness of breath. That day he was on a respirator and taken to the ICU. He died four days later on March 17.

The same day a 92-year-old man would be found dead in his bed by his wife at Willow Wood.

They were the state’s first nursing home deaths, according to state medical examiner data obtained by Gannett.

The first cases of COVID-19 in the state were announced March 1. But it took a month for the state to ask nursing homes to report cases.

In the meantime, seniors died. Fifteen residents in long-term care — seven of them at Willow Wood — succumbed to COVID-19.

Seven people total who lived at Atria Willow Wood would die.

In a pandemic where weeks count, the state had already lost four in the battle to save the frail.

By mid-April, more than 1,300 nursing home workers and residents had tested positive.

In Florida’s daily report on Sunday, 1,741 residents were infected and another 2,385 transferred to hospitals or other facilities. There were 2,040 staffers who had the virus. Deaths had increased by 75 from Thursday to 1,076.

DeSantis has repeatedly said the reason the state didn’t have more nursing home deaths as seen in the Northeast was because hospitals were prohibited from sending COVID-19 positive residents back to facilities.

He presented a slide that said he implemented such requirements in mid-March. But Florida didn’t officially direct hospitals to keep COVID-19 seniors from elder care facilities until deaths were mounting.

Neither his spokeswoman Helen Aguirre Ferré or his office responded to requests for any order in March directed at hospitals regarding transfers.

Elder care experts told The Post the real reason New York and New Jersey suffered was due to elder care workers using subways and trains, which are perfect incubators for the virus.

But DeSantis insisted it was his actions regarding hospital transfers that prevented so many more deaths.

ACHA Secretary Mayhew on March 16 acknowledged elder care centers’ concern about hospitals sending back seniors without a negative COVID-19 test. But she stopped short of ordering hospitals to discontinue the practice.

“We want to encourage and support hospital physicians to appropriately test our high-risk elderly populations and medically frail for COVID-19,” she said at a news conference.

Hospitals in March were already sending residents back to facilities to await test results, according to the ME data.

DeSantis has also said ACHA and the Department of Health behind the scenes provided logistical support and made elder care facilities the top priority.

“Those early actions were supplemented immediately in March and throughout the crisis as things have developed,” he said.

But after banning visitation March 14, it took Florida two more weeks to ask nursing homes and ALFs for a census of COVID positive residents and staff. DeSantis resisted requests by the media to release names of these facilities.

When DeSantis finally did release information on outbreaks at nursing homes and ALFs, there were facilities with active cases left off the list and others without an infection included.

The industry pressured the state to fix its error-prone list. The new list, however, gives only a daily snapshot of infections, so it is difficult to know the true extent of the outbreaks.

quote:

In the days before COVID-19 pounded Florida with the power of Thor’s hammer, Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly bashed New York for sending elderly coronavirus patients from hospitals back to nursing homes.

DeSantis’ touted the state's own solution back in May to relieve hospitals: Seniors who still tested positive for the novel coronavirus but were well on the road to recovery would be sent to a new and yet-to-open Jacksonville nursing home.

Florida ended up designating 23 isolation centers before DeSantis' administration abruptly — and surprisingly — reversed course on Tuesday, announcing it was shutting down the project by stopping admissions at all the facilities by Oct. 1.

The isolation centers were DeSantis’ favorite talking point in protecting seniors in elder care facilities. They were also quite lucrative for the industry at taxpayers’ expense.

Yet, one-third of the isolation centers picked had spotty records on infection control or financial issues that could affect the care of the patients most vulnerable to the disease, a Palm Beach Post investigation found.

And a number of the isolation centers rank in the Top 20 in the state for the number of COVID deaths at facilities.

“You look at the overall ratings, they are not the best facilities in the world. You don’t see the five-star nursing homes going out to designate themselves to be COVID facilities,” said Brian Lee, director of the advocacy group Families for Better Care and who for seven years served as Florida’s ombudsman at the Department of Elder Affairs.

Lee said it seems as if the state just threw darts at a map of Florida to pick the isolation units without checking their own inspection reports. Some of these isolation centers were just dedicated wings at nursing homes while others were COVID only.

The Post investigation found:
- Violations at three centers involved the care of COVID patients and protecting others from the deadly virus.
- Seven of the isolation centers picked have been on the state’s watch list for not meeting minimum standards for nursing care or not correcting violations, COVID or not, in a timely manner.
- Two are part of a chain ordered to pay a $250 million fraud judgment that could put the chain out of business.

As a result, COVID-positive seniors were shuttled for the summer to isolation centers, some of which have struggled with even handling day-to-day care of residents pre-pandemic.

The state’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which regulates nursing homes in Florida, said it always rode herd on these isolation centers.

“The agency thoroughly reviews the regulatory history for nursing homes serving as COVID Isolation Centers, and COVID Isolation Centers receive enhanced oversight given the resident populations they serve,” the agency said in an email in August to The Post.

“Further, we are in daily communication with these providers regarding the status of admissions and discharges of residents.”

Brian Lee, director for Families for Better Care, says Florida's COVID-19 isolation centers for seniors in nursing homes "are not the best facilities in the world."
Ten of the isolation centers, though, failed quality assurance checks that verified COVID data submitted by the nursing homes to the Centers Disease Control and Prevention, The Post investigation found.

“That’s stunning,” Lee said. “How is it possible that nearly half of these facilities designated as isolation facilities are pushing invalid data? That begs the question, ‘What about the data these facilities are sharing with state officials?’ How is AHCA supposed to reimburse facilities properly if the counts are incorrect in so many cases?”

Just last month the isolation centers were going strong.

As of Aug. 26, AHCA reported 1,003 patients in about 1,600 beds in the 23 COVID isolation centers. The agency reported in August that 363 patients had been transferred from a nursing home or assisted living facility to a COVID isolation center and another 1,945 patients were transferred from hospitals.

Eighteen of the 23 have reported 242 deaths in total by Sept. 12.

Cashing in on COVID
Palm Beach County has four COVID isolation centers.

One, Avanté at Boca Raton, somehow missed for three weeks that a remote-control door opener had been pilfered, allowing a resident who had refused to follow contact precautions to escape. He was found across the street on a park bench hours after his flight, records show.

Avanté at Boca was on the state’s watch list in November. It has received an overall below-average Medicare rating and been fined more than $76,200 by federal officials for violations in the past three years. Still, an Avanté executive joined DeSantis at a Miami news conference on July 7 to tout the success of the isolation centers.

The three other isolation centers in Palm Beach County are Lake View Care Center in Delray Beach, Oasis Health and Rehabilitation Center in Lake Worth Beach and Consulate Health Care of West Palm Beach. They have not been cited for any infection control problems in the past year yet have a total of 41 COVID deaths between them.

All rank among long-term care facilities with the most COVID deaths in Palm Beach County, a Sept. 13 Department of Health report shows. Oasis has 17, Lake View has 14, Avanté has 12 and Consulate has 10.

Isolation centers were certainly money-makers for the elder care industry.

AHCA said Monday that elder care centers receive $325 per day for Medicaid patients needing COVID care in addition to the normal reimbursement rate, which averages $240 per day. That breaks down to about $17,000 a month for one COVID patient in an isolation center — all at taxpayers’ expense.

Nursing homes can get additional money from private insurance and Medicare, the agency noted. “That is a huge windfall for them,” Lee said.

The elder care industry has also reaped billions of dollars in federal assistance because of COVID, the advocate said. The pandemic plays right into a dynamic that has always benefited nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

“The worse the care the nursing home delivers the more they get paid. They get a higher reimbursement for pressure sores or urinary tract infections,” Lee explained. “So it’s an incentive for the homes to take COVID patients. That’s because it’s more money.”

This cash register rang loudest in the creation of a 150-bed Miami isolation center.

The Miami Herald reported in July that the state's Department of Emergency Management forged a $1 million-a-month deal to turn a former hospital owned by Nicklaus Children’s Hospital into a 150-bed isolation center that would be run by Avanté Group.

Miami lawyer Alex Heckler coordinated an earlier deal for the hospital, now known as Miami Care Center, that fell through. Heckler was a friend of emergency management Director Jared Moskowitz and contributed to his campaign when he served as a state representative out of Parkland, The Post discovered.

Heckler registered as a lobbyist in May for Avanté Group.

The Miami Care Center stopped taking COVID transfers on Monday. What happens next for the 2½-month-old facility — such as operating as a for-profit nursing home — is unknown but the taxpayers forked out a fortune of $1 million a month either way.

Wendy Milam, corporate director for education at Avanté Group, said after Avanté was asked to run the Miami facility, it identified other communities with need and agreed to open up other facilities for COVID patients “to help decompress the hospitals.”

Besides Miami and Boca Raton, Avanté has isolation centers in Orlando and Melbourne.

“The opportunity to help the community during this pandemic fits perfectly with our mission to serve, care and heal,” Milam said.

The state was quite aware of past deficiencies and the corrective actions taken at its facilities, she said. “AHCA has been very supportive in our opening of these centers,” Milam added.

DeSantis is shutting down the isolation centers even as federal health officials — such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted a conflation of COVID and the flu in the U.S. come the fall and winter.

The closing of the isolation centers comes after the state recently opened up visitation at elder care facilities. Florida is also reportedly eliminating every-other-week testing of staffers at long-term care facilities.

Lee said he thinks the state decided the isolation centers were just too expensive in the end.

Outbreak in Lauderhill
No isolation center has drawn more criticism than the one in Lauderhill in Broward County.

Before the state designated it an isolation center, an April state inspection found numerous problems with how Nspire Healthcare Lauderhill in Broward County handled COVID.

At least 18 residents were affected by poor practices in preventing the spread of COVID that put all 97 residents at risk, an inspection report said.

Residents, even roommates of COVID-positive residents, were found wandering the halls without masks and weren’t shuttled back to their rooms, a key practice required by Broward and others for controlling the disease.

Some staffers didn’t even know which residents had tested positive so they could isolate their roommates and don proper PPE when caring for them, inspection reports show.

Lauderhill Mayor Ken Thurston says getting information from the state on a COVID isolation center in his community has been nearly impossible.
By mid-May, 58 residents and 22 staffers were COVID positive, according to daily reports from the state Department of Health. In June, the facility was designated an isolation center.

“Instead of correcting what is wrong, the state turned it into COVID-19 only,” said Ken Thurston, mayor of Lauderhill, a bedroom community in Broward County.

Miriam Pastor, Nspire’s president, said in a June statement that the facility was picked because of “excellent care that is being provided.”

They reported 23 COVID deaths as of Sept. 12.

Jessica Bocanegra lost her grandmother to COVID at Nspire Lauderhill and said the facility had no business being an isolation center.

“Honestly, I think it’s ridiculous for that center to be a place where all the COVIDs go,” she said. “I don’t think they have good protocols. I don’t think they have good administration.”

Bocanegra’s main criticism of Nspire Lauderhill was that it was too corporate and unresponsive to families. Most of the isolation centers belong to companies with numerous facilities.

The city of Lauderhill remains unsatisfied.

Coronavirus cases in the city have tripled since early June from 92 on June 1 to 356 as of Thursday, DOH reports show.

Earlier in the pandemic, the city expressed its concern to the state about its rising number of COVID cases. The state sent in an epidemiological team to determine whether the virus was under control, Thurston said.

In response to a complaint in March, the state found no deficiencies. However, the next month, inspectors found quite a few problems, including COVID measures taken by the facility.

The facility is on the state watch list because it had failed to meet requirements for a working generator — an issue since 14 residents died at a nearby nursing home in stifling heat following Hurricane Irma in September 2017.

“We have asked the Department of Health for information on how they made the decision to select this particular nursing home. Why did you pick a failed nursing home and make it all COVID?” Thurston said.

“We have got no answers to the questions we’ve asked.”

Another Nspire facility, in Miami-Dade County had “repeated deficiencies related to infection control” four years in a row through 2018. It has recorded 24 deaths.

In November, Nspire Miami Lakes was cited for a break in infection control standards that had the potential for cross-contamination.

Fraud judgment
At other isolation centers, The Post found similar problems with infection control.

Seven staffers and the head of housekeeping at Hillcrest Rehabilitation and Healthcare in Hollywood had to be re-educated on COVID precautions after inspectors saw them doing several things, such as not wearing surgical masks, that could spread the highly contagious virus from their only COVID-positive patient and the person’s two roommates who were being isolated.

Hillcrest has recorded 25 COVID deaths, tied for the most of any isolation center.

Another isolation center, Oakbridge Health Care Center in Lakeland, is operating on a conditional license after it was shut down in December 2017.

Medicare and Medicaid stopped payments after a litany of negligence complaints, recorded in inspections and in lawsuits. It has been on the state’s watch list since 2017 for not correcting a variety of violations.

Oakbridge had deficiencies that included harm to a patient who became unresponsive for at least two days, according to an ACHA complaint, and didn’t get appropriate care because the nurse was tending to more than 50 patients. The patient didn’t go to the hospital until family members called 911 and ended up in intensive care.

Oakbridge has not reported any COVID deaths to the state.

An appeals court in July upheld a quarter-billion-dollar fraud judgment against Oakbridge’s owner, Consulate Health Care, the largest nursing home chain in Florida. Company leaders said paying the fine could lead to “immediate economic extinction.”

A Consulate home in Palm Harbor, Countryside Rehab and Healthcare Center, was cited in June — as it was caring for COVID-19 patients — for poor use of personal protective gear. Inspectors found at least three nurses wearing masks that had been pulled down. Countryside also had been cited for minor hand-washing problems in August 2019.

Like Hillcrest, it has recorded 25 deaths.

Consulate did not respond to questions for this story.

And finally, a resident at Clear Choice Conway Lakes Rehabilitation and Health Center in Orlando, which has experienced only one COVID death, had an infection that could cause symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life-threatening inflammation of the colon.

Despite signs warning that PPE must be worn because the patient was in isolation, a nurse in late July was found in the resident’s room chatting without wearing any protective gear. The nurse also didn’t wash his hands. Another staffer didn’t wash her hands when she left the room and wore her PPE in the hallway, which was against the rules.

Strategy abandoned
DeSantis’ numerous victory laps back in May almost always had him taking digs at New York for allowing hospitals to send seniors with COVID-19 back to elder care facilities.

The idea in New York was to free up beds but a state directive there ordering hospitals to send these seniors back to facilities was akin to pouring gasoline on the fire.

More than 6,600 New Yorkers in elder care facilities lost their lives to COVID as of early May. The number of deaths is believed to have nearly doubled since.

Florida has tallied 5,350 deaths in elder care facilities.

DeSantis touted in May that an AHCA order forbidding hospitals from discharging positive seniors back to elder care facilities spared Florida a similar fate even though the order had come down only a few days earlier.

Dr. Larry Bush, an infectious disease specialist at Wellington Regional Medical Center, said the isolation centers were a godsend for the hospitals, which had basically become custodians for these seniors who tested positive but were otherwise just a little sick or asymptomatic.

“It frees up the hospital to take care of other people,” Bush said. “It just lightened the load.”

It became apparent to the state over the summer that a handful of isolation centers were inadequate when cases in Florida surged dramatically.

As hospitals filled up, the state scrambled to add more isolation centers.

The Lauderhill mayor says that a facility in nearby Tamarac became an isolation center because, as he understands it, all of the beds at Nspire were filled with COVID-19 patients.

Florida went from one on April 14 to five in May. By the end of June the state was up to 23.

This whole idea of isolation centers for COVID-19 seniors came to fruition after Duval County nursing home operator, Dolphin Pointe Health Care Center’s co-owner Geoff Fraser, pitched the idea.

At first, the state balked, floating the idea that Dolphin Pointe could take just overflow patients from hospitals, but eventually it came around to Fraser’s approach, he said.

Dolphin Pointe took residents from Central Florida, the Tampa area and the Panhandle and has had 220 patients successfully go back to their elder care centers, he said. It has recorded three deaths.

Fraser said setting up these isolation centers isn’t as easy as just housing COVID residents together. He said there have to be rigid PPE protocols, extra staffing and extra infection control.

Seven of the facilities are like Dolphin Pointe — nursing homes that had yet to open but became isolation centers.

But then AHCA said other facilities pitched themselves as isolation centers.

The agency said that staff who care for COVID patients do not provide care for non-COVID residents. “There should be no crossover of staff or residents and no shared spaces,” the agency said.

AARP says the most serious cases are still centered at elder care facilities, not isolation centers, and the crisis remains. The industry remains ill-prepared to corral the coronavirus and the organization is not surprised that isolation centers have problems.

“Four of 10 five-star facilities in the U.S. have been cited for infection-control problems,” said Dave Bruns, AARP’s spokesman in Florida. “So infection-control problems are endemic and have been endemic in elder care facilities for decades.”

He stressed AARP understands that the Department of Health, AHCA and DeSantis have tried with these isolation centers to address the problem, but that nursing homes, both residents and staff, represent 2 percent of Florida’s population but more than 40 percent of all cases and deaths.

“They have put in tremendous efforts and done what needed to be done on many occasions, but it hasn’t worked. There are too many deaths, too many cases,” Bruns said.

“This pandemic has cruelly exposed all of the long-standing problems in long-term care in Florida and in America.”

quote:

More nursing home residents and staff died of COVID-19 in Florida during a four-week period ending Aug. 22 than in any other state in the country, according to an AARP analysis released today.

Florida accounted for 21 percent of all nursing home resident deaths due to the virus nationwide. The data shows the state with 17 percent of staff deaths nationally during this time.

“These sadly predictable data trends are also preventable,” said Jeff Johnson, AARP Florida state director, in a press release. “The best way to protect yourself and your loved ones is to get vaccinated.”

The elder advocacy organization used most recent Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, which is self-reported by nursing homes nationwide.

A total of 237 seniors and 13 staff in the state died during this period.

The delta variant surge has once again spotlighted Florida’s nursing homes, which were hit particularly hard in the early days of the pandemic. A third of the state’s deaths overall have been among people living in long-term care facilities.

Florida currently ranks second worst for staff vaccinations, lagging behind all other states except Louisiana. A little less than half — 48 percent — of Florida nursing home staffers have been vaccinated.

The state leads the nation in new COVID-19 cases among staff, with 94 percent of nursing homes reporting staff infections during the monthlong period.

Staff vaccine rates have improved by three percentage points within the last four weeks of data, however.

Florida long-term care facilities are working to incentivize employee shots ahead of a Biden administration rule that will require nursing homes to mandate staff vaccinations, which is expected to be released later this month.

“The hesitancy that you see among our staff is no different than the hesitancy you see out in the community,” Kristen Knapp, communications director for the Florida Health Care Association, which represents more than 80 percent of Florida nursing homes, previously told the Times. “We are doing things every day to try to encourage our staff to get vaccinated — we’ve done social media campaigns, put out PSAs posters, given financial incentives. This is not for a lack of trying.”

It’s hard to assess the current toll of the virus on people living and working inside long-term care facilities, as Florida stopped sharing this data with the public in May.

Federal data used in the AARP report lags by about two weeks, and does not include information about the situation inside Florida’s assisted living facilities, which are not required to report to the national government.

About 22 percent of nursing homes are experiencing staffing shortages, according to Medicaid and Medicare data, up from 18 percent in the previous monthlong period.

Willa Rogers posted:

PhazonLink posted:

Dumb question, but does the gov. do any "soft" population counting outside of census years.

Covid numbers will/should reveal themseleves when some trends start in 2020 for some reason.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

Short answer yes, which is why we have population estimates for non-0-ending years. It's based on representative samples, vs the census' theoretical "we'll count basically everyone", but year on year census estimates aren't the worst.

Main Paineframe posted:

And as the final blow against DeSantis's brilliant nursing home policies, he just signed the "No Patient Left Alone Act", a new law he'd championed which not only bans healthcare facilities and nursing homes from preventing in-person visitation if the patient is lonely or unhappy, but also prevents them from denying entry to unvaccinated people.

Willa Rogers posted:

Actually, the suspension of in-person visits, as well as in-person inspections, led to cases of elder abuse and neglect. The emotional & non-covid physical effects on seniors & the developmentally disabled in residential care was widespread & well-documented. Alzheimers & dementia patients were particularly affected, e.g.

The FL bill allows people who are hospitalized under certain conditions, or living in institutionalized settings, to have one designated caregiver who's allowed to visit a resident, client or patient. It passed the FL Senate 37-0, and the FL House by 115-0.

Most other states have passed similar laws, including CT, MN & WA. Disability-rights & elder-care advocates have pushed for these bills, including AARP, the state chapters of which have propelled this legislation across the country.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Do they require vaccinations? Cause if not I don't see how that's a good thing to allow unvaccinated visitors to see immunocompromised grandma.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Do they require vaccinations? Cause if not I don't see how that's a good thing to allow unvaccinated visitors to see immunocompromised grandma.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Yeah I do agree allowing visitation is important, but these facilities also have a responsibility to protect their residents.

I can't find any easily accessible info about vaccination status requirements.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

Feels a week late to be having a discussion about how well desantis handled the pandemic based off of a breitbart article from may 2020

Willa Rogers posted:

Can you please quote the particular post that you're taking to task? Thanks!

If you mean the National Review interview with DeSantis we've already discussed why that was relevant to the conversation at that point in time.

Let me know if you need me to clear up or clarify anything I've said, as I've said.

CommieGIR posted:

The level you are willing to go to defend DeSantis is really getting bizarre.

Willa Rogers posted:

I think I've been pretty consistent in backing up my argument with the CDC data, rather than arguing things that no one has said.

Recall that this convo started with a news story of how well DeSantis is doing in fundraising (a story I didn't post) and puzzlement at the reasons that might be. Then the thread then became a hive of discord over whether DeSantis killed olds as efficiently as other governors did throughout the pandemic. (As it turns out, he killed fewer than some and more than others.)

The big surprise to me was that Arizona did so much better with nursing-home deaths than Florida when I don't recall any coverage of it. (Not that I've searched this out.) Maybe I should bizarrely focus on that instead of Florida, bc I was pretty shocked at the low rates of nursing-home deaths when I looked up the actual data.

Why do you think Arizona did well with that? What did Murphy do in January 2021 that Cuomo didn't?

n.b.: I'm not in love with or bizarrely defending Ducey either, and know nothing about his state's data or reporting; just going by that CDC data, which took me by surprise.

eta: I can swear on your holy book of choice that I do not support his reelection or any future elections he may enter. He's a horrible guy who has horrible policies for the most part, and his protection of the olds does not outweigh the harm he's done & continues to do.

Does that help clarify my stance on DeSantis?

CommieGIR posted:

More confused than anything, that's all. I just, personally, don't think it matters if DeSantis did better. I also have every reason to be skeptical of any data painting his COVID numbers in a positive light.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Could we a weird/terrible/entertaining week for world politics.

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1512450834851848192
https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1512032009312509957

The left, center left, and center right in France has completely collapsed.

It's basically just Macron's weird centrist/socially liberal/pro-Europe brand of politics and diet Fascism.

Socialist party polling at 1%.

The farther left party polling at 14%.

The center right party polling at 12%.

The far right and the OTHER far right parties are polling at a combined 56% in the first round of voting.

A big flaming stink posted:

kind of a galaxy-brained move on macron's part to announce the raising of the retirement age a month before the election, huh?

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Could we a weird/terrible/entertaining week for world politics.

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1512450834851848192
https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1512032009312509957

The left, center left, and center right in France has completely collapsed.

It's basically just Macron's weird centrist/socially liberal/pro-Europe brand of politics and diet Fascism.

Socialist party polling at 1%.

The farther left party polling at 14%.

The center right party polling at 12%.

The far right and the OTHER far right parties are polling at a combined 56% in the first round of voting.

quote:

Yelyzaveta is far from the first child to be separated from a loved one at the border by officials. If the adult crossing with a child can’t prove that they are the legal guardian, they are often split apart from the minor.

Regardless of the reasoning, the separation that Yelyzaveta and Surazhsky experienced exacerbated the trauma that the teen was already going through from the war and having to leave her mother behind.

When Yelyzaveta and her mother fled to Poland, they were accompanied by Surazhsky’s aunt and Yelyzaveta’s close friend. Neither had passports, and Ukrainian consulates have been unable to issue them, according to Surazhsky...

“They told us, ‘Everything will be OK. She’s going to be treated better than us. They get better food than us,’” Surazhsky recalled.

Yelyzaveta called her a little while later, crying. She told Surazhsky that the officers had taken all of her belongings from her — her phone, her documents, her luggage, her book and even her shoelaces.

The teen called again that evening and told Surazhsky the situation was even worse. She said she was being held in a prison cell with about 25 other people — Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians. They had to share one bathroom and sleep on the floor using only thin, metallic blankets that felt like foil. There were no windows.

Yelyzaveta was describing the holding cells in the basement of the port of entry that asylum seekers have complained about for years.

Two days later, Yelyzaveta called with exciting news. She had been told that she would be released from the port of entry. Surazhsky, who had been staying with a friend in Southern California, headed back to the port of entry to pick up the girl. She waited five or six hours, and eventually approached a CBP officer who told Surazhsky that Yelyzaveta had been transferred to another facility. Surazhsky was in shock...

“Now it’s in the bureaucratic limbo,” Surazhsky said.

In the meantime, seeing Ukrainian flags all over businesses and events around the United States has felt frustrating to her.

“It feels like a mockery,” she said. “The U.S. is not really allowing an easy pathway for Ukrainians to help take care of their families when they need it the most right now.”

nine-gear crow posted:

The left suddenly going numb-balled and collapsing in a heap of its own piss as everyone runs to the center like a bunch of screaming cowards right before a national election? Surely you jest, that's NEVER happened before anywhere on the planet.

Sedisp posted:

We officially have more discussion in the US CE thread about french elections than the fact that you are now no longer allowed to exist as trans in Alabama until you are 19.

Im gonna go scream now.

Lib and let die posted:

Be the change you want to see in the thread!

Herstory Begins Now posted:

Why aren't all the people who were run off posting in the thread anymore?

Sedisp posted:

Im not going to speak into a void of mostly cis people that just don't seem to care. Get enough of that offline thank you.