The U.S. Is Repeating Its Deadliest Pandemic Mistake
In early April, Melvin Hector, a geriatrician in Tucson, Arizona, went into Sapphire of Tucson Nursing and Rehabilitation to check on one of his patients, who had been sent to the hospital the previous day. Hector found the woman in her room, wearing a surgical mask. She had been tested for COVID-19, but the results had not yet come back. When Hector asked for a mask for himself, he says a nurse responded, “We don’t have any.”
“I say to her, ‘You’re going into the room; the other staff are going in the room. She just went out to the hospital for a respiratory disease. And we don’t have any masks in the building?’” Hector recalled in a recent interview.
“They’re on order,” Hector remembered the nurse replying.
When Hector reported the situation to the Arizona Department of Health Services, he said Sapphire ended their working relationship. (In an email to me, Sapphire claimed that it had never suffered shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and that the nurse said she didn’t know where to find more masks, not that there were none. In response to Sapphire’s statement, Hector said, “They lie.”)
To Hector, the episode was a microcosm of the myriad reasons why the United States has suffered so many COVID-19 deaths among nursing-home staff and residents. “Arizona is just one manifestation of a nationwide policy, an administrative policy to ignore this pandemic until it couldn’t be ignored,” Hector told me.
[Read: A devastating new stage of the pandemic]
Few places represent the awful consequences of this neglect more than nursing homes. Of the country’s nearly 130,000 coronavirus deaths, more than have been residents or employees of nursing homes and long-term-care facilities. facilities has reported at least one death. In just one New Jersey nursing home, at least 53 residents died after the with the healthy and staffers had little more than for protection.
