"Surviving ventilators, only to find lives diminished; Amid widespread use for coronavirus, breathing machines’ long-term effects on patients raise concern" by Felice J. Freyer Globe Staff, April 25, 2020
Two months after leaving the intensive care unit, Rob Rainer returned to his law practice in Revere, eager to resume his old life after surviving a severe lung infection that tethered him to a breathing machine for a month, but as he sat down at his desk, the former hard-driving multitasker found he couldn’t stay on track with even one task. Phone conversations left him overwhelmed. He was baffled by a computer program he himself had developed.
Today, five years later, Rainer’s life is very different — his law practice shuttered, his two houses sold. At 58, he lives modestly with his wife in a small condo in Hudson, N.H.
While the novel coronavirus didn’t exist in 2015, today thousands of COVID-19 patients in the United States are enduring the same experience that Rainer did, lying in a medication-induced coma as a ventilator pushes air into their weakened lungs for days or weeks on end, and like Rainer, many will never be the same.
That's looking more and more like the case now.
Related:
"Ann Langenfeld, a Newton resident, said she started feeling sick after she took a trip to New York City on March 4. “I just thought I had the flu,” she said, but, “they sent me for a CT and X-ray, and my lungs were full of the disease,” she said. “They said that they had to put me on a ventilator right away.” Langenfeld was put in a medically induced coma and spent the next 16 days on a ventilator. Langenfeld is a mother of two girls, ages 16 and 21, and she’s happy to be back home with her family. She wants to share her story to educate people and let them know that the coronavirus needs to be taken seriously. “It’s very, very contagious, and it’s something that people should be very afraid of,” she said....."
Oh, they did a CT scan, huh?
One can only wonder what all that radiation did to her immune system.
That whole related story stinks of scripted propaganda using crisis actors.
She knows what is ahead of her now, right?
The widespread use of ventilators to save COVID-19 patients has sparked layers of controversy. Hospitals throughout the country don’t have enough breathing machines to meet the predicted demand. Proposals on how to ration them have been called discriminatory, and then, many COVID-19 patients die despite the ventilators; a new study of New York patients found that, among 320 who used ventilators, 88 percent died.
Okay, that information has been out there for weeks thanks to doctors blowing the whistle, but the Globe is only picking that up now.
The misdiagnosis and use of the ventilators now looks like malpractice at best, murder at worst.
Now, a new discussion is emerging: the fate of those who survive the ventilator, but awaken to find their brains and bodies altered.
All of a sudden, ventilators no longer work. Been used for decades, etc, no problem, but now they don't work.
Dr. Daniela J. Lamas, a critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, once considered her job complete, and successful, when a patient survived an intensive care stay, but over the years she learned more about what happens to patients after they leave her care. Just because someone makes it through, she said, “does not mean they will be OK to reenter the world.”
Ventilators force air, sometimes with added oxygen, into a patient’s airways, essentially breathing for them so their lungs have a chance to rest and recover. Patients must be heavily sedated so they won’t feel the tube down their throats or fight the machine’s rhythm. They are typically immobile for long periods of time, leading to muscle wasting.
That means putting them on the ventilators was in effect killing people, and looks like Pharma made a killing as well!
Although no one knows how COVID-19 patients in particular will fare over time, patients using ventilators for other illnesses typically experience long-term consequences. The prolonged immobility leaves many so feeble they can’t even sit up, and muscle weakness can persist even two years later.
Let us all pray for Ann Langenfeld, hmmm?
Many had frightening experiences in the ICU — or imagined them while delirious — leading to post-traumatic stress disorder. Many, like Rainer, find they can’t think as clearly as before, and as they realize how much they’ve lost, patients often suffer from anxiety and depression.
Yeah, the poor patient imagined the malpractice or murderous care, $ure.
Together, these physical, psychological, and cognitive changes are known as post-intensive care syndrome, a term coined in 2012. Since then, about 25 or 30 hospitals have set up clinics to help patients understand and cope with the aftermath of an ICU stay. Lamas’s “After the ICU” clinic at the Brigham is the only one in the Boston area.
They caused the problem, but are here to help.
This is evil.
Here and elsewhere, most patients are simply discharged to fend for themselves, cared for by primary care doctors who may not have full knowledge of what they’ve been through.
“My worry is that patients survive and they’re just let free in the world, with no explanation of what happened to them,” Lamas said.
Yeah, God forbid any of us should be free.
Emerging evidence suggests that ventilators may not always be effective for COVID-19 patients, and that other less-invasive ways of assisting breathing could work better. If these findings are borne out, and fewer COVID-19 patients end up on ventilators, that will be good news for them — because in every other respect, things are stacked against them.
I'm going to have to start taking shorter breaths, readers.
COVID-19 patients tend to require an exceptionally long time on the ventilator — weeks instead of days — leading to more damage and slower recovery. The steps doctors take to mitigate harm to ICU patients, such as frequent awakenings and physical therapy, can’t happen as infection-control efforts limit the number of staff going in and out of the unit, and the loved ones who comfort and orient the patient have to stay away, too.
Ann Langenfeld.
When Jon Graham, who contracted COVID-19 in early March, awoke from nine days on the ventilator, his wife of 18 years was not at his side. He couldn’t understand where he was or what had happened to him.
Graham, a 62-year-old graphic designer, kept pulling out his IVs and the tube providing oxygen. The nurses at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center had to tie him down by the wrists.
“I’m in a room with alarms on it, doors locked, no human contact, nurses with hazmat suits looking in the little window," he recalled two weeks later. "You’re really isolated by yourself. … It was awful, awful, awful.”
Our political leaders and their genocidal string-pullers do not care.
After a couple of days his mind cleared and the restraints were removed, but he realized he was too weak to even walk to the bathroom, and while he seemed to know what was going on, he was also prone to delusions and paranoia, as often happens after prolonged sedation. He thought the doctors and his wife, Tracy, were plotting to keep him from coming home. He became convinced his hospital roommate had stolen a gift from a friend.
We are heading into a BRAVE NEW WORLD, folks!
Any who object will be called crazy and drugged, or be drugged and called crazy.
This is EVIL, folks!
Even after Tracy confirmed that the friend never sent a gift, Graham said he’s not sure he believes it. The delusions seem so real, they are experienced as memories.
Graham returned home April 13. “I’m feeling a little bit better every day,” he said in an interview three days later. “At least I can stand up and walk around a little bit.”
Ann Langenfeld.
His wife was surprised when Graham blew his top over an Internet issue. “Jon never gets angry,” she said, and he’s not reading like he used to, feeling too weary for the mental exertion.
Though grateful for the care he received at UMass and thrilled to be home in Clinton with his wife and their 7-year-old twins, he knows he’s got a long recovery ahead.
“I don’t feel confused or anything, but I definitely don’t feel like my normal self,” he said.
You never will, either.
It's your "new normal."
The doctor who took care of him at UMass, Adarsha Bajracharya, was optimistic that mentally Graham could return “near to baseline.” Graham hopes to go back to work eventually.
It’s a goal many ventilator survivors don’t achieve.
One study of 922 survivors of acute respiratory distress syndrome, the condition that typically leads to ventilator use, found that nearly half were jobless a year after recovery.
Dr. Brad Butcher, director of the Critical Illness Recovery Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said the focus on unemployment caused by pandemic-related shutdowns misses another key aspect: Many COVID-19 survivors will be unable to return to work for some time, if ever.
“This is going to have a profound effect on people’s lives and the economy,” he said.
How appropriate that the name of the doctor the Globe cites is Butcher.
Time to huff and puff over the controlled demolition and destruction of the economy.
According to the most recent data, about half the 4.8 million people who survive a stay in the ICU develop some aspect of post-intensive care syndrome, said Tammy Eaton, a nurse practitioner who cofounded the Critical Illness Recovery Center with Butcher.
“That’s going to change pretty drastically with COVID-19,” as thousands of patients emerge from long, lonely ICU stays, Eaton said.
If they emerge.
Only 30 percent to 40 percent of patients who survived a ventilator say they feel like they’re back to normal after three to six months, Butcher said.
Ann Langenfeld.
Ventilator use affects thinking ability in ways that are not fully understood, but which may result from sedating medications or from loss of oxygen to the brain.
Yeah, you read that right.
They are LITERALLY KILLING YOU $OFTLY!
Then they can blame dementia or Alzheimers!
The cognitive effects can be hard to detect at first, especially in high-functioning, high-IQ people, said Dr. Carla Sevin, director of the ICU Recovery Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Sevin recalled having “a lovely conversation” with a man who seemed to be doing well after an ICU stay, but when a psychologist gave him a basic mental status exam — asking such questions as what year it is, who the president is — she was shocked to see that the man did not know the answers. “His wife was equally shocked,” Sevin said.
When these seemingly recovered patients return to work, they often end up having their duties reduced or getting fired, she said.
Then they are non-e$$ential.
Stacey Salomon, a social worker in the medical intensive care unit at the Brigham, said even patients who don’t return to their previous lives “sometimes get back to a different place,” though it’s not always a bad one.
Having to rely on family members can strengthen family bonds, she said, and the struggle to get better often engenders compassion. “They’re never quite the same, but there can be a real sense of growth and they often want to give back to others,” she said.
This day-after-day spew is f**king sickening.
Rainer, the former lawyer who couldn’t resume his work, can attest to that. About eight months after his ICU stay, he got connected with Lamas at the Brigham, and after reviewing his treatment with her, was finally able to make sense of his experiences. An MRI revealed damage to the parts of his brain involved in decision-making and judgment. “Knowing there was a physical reason for the difficulties I was having was helpful,” he said.
He ended up designing the website for Lamas’s “After the ICU” clinic. Today he teaches a business course for an online university and is working with his wife on starting a nonprofit, but he’s a high-powered lawyer no more. He sometimes nods off at 4 in the afternoon and sleeps through to the next day.
Through it all, Rainer has discovered a “weird side effect” of his ICU experience — happiness.
“I’m much happier than I used to be," he said. "I laugh and I joke around and I don’t take things as seriously as I used to. I look forward to each day, even though I’m not going to get much done.”
This has to be sheer bull$hit propaganda, folks, and if not, they are are part of this whole fraudulent hoax and evil effort.
--more--"
Sorry for keeping you on that and letting you Shit yourself:
"The coronavirus can lead to nausea or diarrhea. Although it can be uncomfortable, it might be best to let whatever gastrointestinal distress happen, because it is a way your body gets rid of infection. “We are not recommending anyone take anything to stop the diarrhea,” said Dr. Stacey Curtis, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy. “We want them to go ahead and have diarrhea,” but diarrhea can cause dehydration, so she recommends getting an electrolyte-replenisher like Pedialyte to replace minerals....."
I suppose the elitist insults at this time would be so over the top and unbelievable that I should not be astonished, and yet there it is. The ostensible aim of the article from Amelia Nierenberg of the Jew York Times is how should you stock your medicine cabinet?
She talks to Dr. Ilisa Bernstein, the senior vice president of pharmacy practice and government affairs at the American Pharmacists Association, and oxygen levels of the bloodstream with Dr. Albert Rizzo, the chief medical officer of the American Lung Association.
Apparently, there is some controversy over whether ibuprofen is safe to take for coronavirus, and the World Health Organization (basically owned by Bill Gates now) said it was not aware of any research showing that the over-the-counter drug should not be taken by infected patients.
Of course, if Trump had said such a thing their would be hell to pay.
Related:
Genocide trial in Germany for accused ISIS member in death of Yazidi girl
More Jew York Times garbage, and speaking of genocidal monsters, the full half page below that piece of propaganda was an ad for the Bo$ton $peakers $eries, which are thought-provoking evenings of diverse opinions and world perspectives:
How about that wonderful genocidal fella with the nice smile on the far left there?
He's appearing in October when everything will be back to normal, and will be toasted like the leader of Ireland:
"For a Dublin bar, the pint glass is half full even in lockdown" by Dara Doyle Bloomberg, April 25, 2020
In early March, The Big Romance in Dublin was gearing up for the most profitable period of the Irish drinking season. With about $10,800 worth of beer in stock, it stood ready for the pint-wielding revelers who flood the city for the St. Patrick’s festival. Then the lockdown hit.
As the coronavirus swept across Ireland, the bar, which moved into the slowly gentrifying district about 1½ years ago, was forced to close its doors as social distancing had already proved a futile exercise and was dropped after a day.
The virus has forced The Big Romance to reinvent itself if the bar wants to survive. Now there’s a website supercharged by social media, where customers can order drink; and a virtual tab that can be loaded up for happier days and that’s matched by the proprietor, a potentially lucrative proposition once the bar comes back, but a total writeoff should the doors remain closed for good; and drivers who deliver two-pint ‘‘growler’’ bottles across the city.
Related: Massachusetts medical marijuana registrations spike 245 percent
It was a fun recreation while it lasted.
The struggles facing The Big Romance are emblematic of the wider challenges thrown up for the small companies that form the backbone of Europe’s economy, accounting for more than a third of all jobs across the region. Like most business owners, Steve Manning, 39, one of the bar’s founders, was caught off guard by the crisis. He has no idea when or how the bar might reopen, or whether customers will have cash to spend when the lockdown ends.
The nation’s 7,000 bars have been shuttered for the last five weeks, meaning pubs like The Big Romance and Graingers Hanlons Corner have had to innovate to survive. Based loosely on Japan’s ‘‘listening bars,’’ The Big Romance mixed music with craft beer after opening on Dublin’s north side in November 2018. Before the virus hit, business was ‘‘healthy,’’ employing half a dozen people and beating Manning’s early hopes, he said. When people began enacting social distancing in February, the proprietor tried out the concept in his space, to little avail.
‘‘It just doesn’t work,’’ said Manning. ‘‘A lot of people who work in bars tend to live with their parents, so there was a risk. It proved impossible.’’
Another issue that proved problematic was its large stock of craft beer. Unlike wine, draught beer deteriorates quickly; it has to be consumed within three months.
Orders poured in. They’ve hired three mask-wearing drivers, who work eight-hour shifts delivering to doorsteps across Dublin every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
‘‘If anything, we’ve created jobs,’’ said Manning.”There hasn’t been any let-up.’’
One bonus of shifting online is that The Big Romance has attracted a crowd that normally wouldn’t have made it through the door. Whereas as the typical visitor would be in their 30s, the age of customers has crept up noticeably, Manning said.
WTF?
Somehow it's still all good?
The Bloomberg reporter must be stumbling drunk.
This was the backwash that the web left:
‘‘We might have been on their radar, but they just never got to us,’’ he said. ‘‘Now they are at home, they’ve got time on their hands, want a couple of beers and want to try something different.’’
Despite all the new flourishes, Manning says he’s frustrated by the lack of any firm indication about when they may be able to reopen. This week, Ireland’s health minister, Simon Harris, hinted that bars might be shut until 2021, a blow to the 50,000 people working in the sector and prompting industry lobbyists to speculate many of the nation’s pubs will never reopen. Manning said he was getting condolence texts from friends, but, for now, he’s determined to remain optimistic.....
I see an IRISH UPRISING REAL SOON!
--more--"
Unbelievably, the same page carried a quarter ad for.... the Bo$ton $peakers $eries, which are thought-provoking evenings of diverse opinions and world perspectives:
How about that wonderful genocidal fella with the nice smile on the far left there?
He's appearing in October when everything will be back to normal.
Time to pray to the porcelain God:
"Church donations have plunged because of the coronavirus. Some churches won’t survive" by Michelle Boorstein Washington Post, April 25, 2020
Pastor J. Artie Stuckey has cut or eliminated every staff salary at his small Mississippi church. He’s nervously watching the payments for the building where Restoration Baptist meets. He reminds his congregation to keep tithing, but he knows many of them — the barber, the electrician, the musician — have also seen their finances rocked by the pandemic shutdown.
Stuckey, a 42-year-old who sold cars until ministry called him 15 years ago, is sympathetic to being cash-strapped. Restoration wasn’t in great financial shape even before the virus wiped out more than 50 percent of its weekly offerings, but now the 65-member evangelical church outside Jackson is in survival mode. Which, to Stuckey, feels like a test of faith.
‘‘I made a commitment to God, to my people. We’ve been teaching and preaching faith. Anyone can be a leader, but if you’re a faith leader, what do we do?’’ he asked. ‘‘Do we fold, or do we become a living example of what we’ve preached for so many years?’’
The novel coronavirus is pressing painfully on the soft underbelly of US houses of worship: their finances. About a third of all congregations have no savings, according to the 2018-19 National Congregations Study.
That is WAR TERMINOLOGY, and it is GODDAMN OFFENSIVE!
At least Bezo's mouthpiece is making it clear that the RULING CLA$$ has in fact declared WAR ON US and is SEEKING TO EXTERMINATE US!!!
The blow has been hardest on the nation’s many small congregations (about half of US congregations are the size of Stuckey’s or smaller). Some experts think the coronavirus could reshape the country’s religious landscape and wipe out many small houses of worship. These are places where members typically go to seek guidance and comfort, but members are now finding closed buildings and desperate pleas for funds.
The synagogues will be fine!
With funding at about 65 percent of normal, Rev. Rickey Scott, pastor of the 175-member East St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church outside Oxford, Miss., has cut all of his staff. The region has poor connectivity, many people lack money to pay for devices to connect to the Internet, and some are older and uncomfortable with the technology.
‘‘I see my psychological effect like that of the Apostle Paul when he was in prison, to the Philippians,’’ he said, citing writings attributed to an imprisoned Paul sending a message to a community of Christians in Greece.
‘‘I feel I’m in spiritual solitary confinement. For the sake of Jesus Christ, I have to endure this suffering.’’
He would carry his own cross to crucifixion along with the rest of his sheeple.
What bankrupted churches and congregations will do is destroy another organized resistance to what is happening.
You have to give the evil psychopath f***s their due; they planned this well.
It’s too early to know how hard houses of worship ultimately will be hit, and clergy say a lot depends on how long giving is disrupted.
Patrick Markey, executive director of the Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference, said most Catholic dioceses were able to apply for aid made available this spring by the Small Business Administration to help with paying salaries.
Are you flipping kidding me?
Where is the $eparation of Church and $tate?
Those perverts got a f**king bailout to pay salaries because Catholici$m is a $mall bu$ine$$!
I'm so glad I excommunicated myself from that cabal.
That's where my pre$$ walked out on the sermon, and how is that audit of the Vatican Bank going?
Scott said he applied for the SBA money but did not get any. Stuckey did not apply.
Typically US Hindu temples collect money when worshipers come throughout the week to pray and make offerings or when priests go to their homes to perform special blessings. Many smaller temples are staying open to do the required prayers with skeleton staffing even as no visitors come to donate.
Among them is the Sri Panchamukha Hanuman Temple in Los Angeles; this month, it put out an urgent Facebook appeal for financial help. ‘‘There are no devotees. The temple is completely closed,’’ the priest, Sriman Narasimhacharya Cherukupally, says in the appeal video, with a large representation of the Hindu deity Hanuman behind him. ‘‘Please be with us, with your kind heart, and protect and save your temple.’’
In addition to the federal payroll protection program, there are private efforts. Among them is a nonprofit named Churches Helping Churches, which is collecting money from larger congregations, foundations, and individuals to help smaller churches. It has received 850 applications since opening the first week of April.
Related:
"nonprofits provide new ways for corporations and individuals to influence"
As if they needed any more.
You know they are tax-exempt, too?
How charitable -- to them$elves!
Clergy are making hard choices in the meantime.
The Rev. Chris Butler oversees three small congregations in the Chicago area. One, in South Holland, has experienced a drop of 70 percent in giving. Another, which has about 30 members and had been based at a city McDonald’s, has shifted to group conference prayer by phone. Giving remains steady at Butler’s Hyde Park congregation, which for now is helping sustain the overall operation, he said. He also has received some aid from Churches Helping Churches. ‘‘I think the financial situation is going to be all right. I just believe in God’s provision,’’ he said.
You mean this guy?
Indeed, some clergy see the virus as a divinely inspired challenge, a chance to refocus on the core of their faith, to purify, to pray in the quiet, to worry less about building funds and costly programming and to think more about getting out and helping the needy, about evangelizing.
Some say the virus may speed up a cruel evolution — the end of congregations that have not embraced technology for functions including streaming services, paying bills, and using cloud computing. That includes congregations with members who can’t afford devices or connectivity. The virus is also forcing a reckoning about the way younger Americans give — sporadically, not weekly as older churchgoers do.
Yeah, you will be raptured up to the data-collecting clouds of the NSA and CIA!
They are your God now!
The Rev. C.J. Rhodes of Mount Helm Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., said 20 percent to 30 percent of his 165 members are uncomfortable with electronic technology and avoid going online, which has made it more challenging to be in touch with them during the viral outbreak. The biggest cost, he said, has been the emotional and mental impact on the older members who depend on the church for social interaction and support.
God bless them, for they will have to be eliminated.
Rhodes said he thinks the virus will trigger a religious revival once people come back together, but Stuckey is trying to find the right tone. He has building payments to make, a six-person crew that is not getting regular salaries, and he’s still hustling to put on livestreamed and drive-in services, to make calls to those who are hurting. He knows there are congregants who are not working and can’t give, while others are still getting paid. He has seen people posting on social media, saying the church shouldn’t be asking for money at all during a crisis.
We won't be coming back together again.
‘‘What I try to say is ‘The Lord is aware of your situation,’ ’’ Stuckey said. ‘‘We survive on generosity. If people stop giving, we die.’’
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To see what is happening at Mississippi churches, see if you can find one of the video links early in the post. The pastor will set you straight in a bitchute.
"Salem church service tightens Zoom services after racist video attack" by Lucas Phillips Globe Correspondent, April 25, 2020
A Salem church is holding its first service with extra security measures Sunday, a week after its virtual gathering was disrupted by racial slurs and images of a burning cross, according to police and the church.
Oh, no, the stench of a self-inflicted, agenda-pushing piece of propaganda and false flag!
Salem police confirmed Saturday that they are investigating a “zoombombing” incident at the Tabernacle Church on April 19 and have been in contact with the FBI.
They are already Zooming in on suspects.
The Rev. Joseph Amico said a member of the congregation was about to address the 60 to 70 people who had joined the Zoom service to invite them to make baked goods for a local homeless shelter, when multiple unknown users blitzed the meeting’s moderator with meeting permission requests, and eventually took control of the call.
In a video of the call, shared with the Globe, the image of Amico in the pulpit was abruptly replaced by a video of the Klu Klux Klan burning a cross, while a song played using a racial epithet.
“We’re getting bombed,” the preacher, Holly Brauner, said in the recording, as a moderator tried to get what appeared to be three ill-intentioned users off the call. One was visible, a white man wearing a bandana over his mouth and dancing to the song in a desk chair. In about a minute, the Zoom meeting was ended.
More WAR TERMINOLOGY!
“I think at first everyone was just in shock,” Amico said in a phone interview Saturday, “and then people were horrified by the images and what they were hearing."
According to Robert Trestan, the New England director of the Anti-Defamation League, hundreds of incidents like the one in Salem have been reported all around the country, as COVID-19 moves most gatherings online.
“What’s really troubling is people are really going out of their way to disrupt these people meetings virtually,” he said in a phone interview.
Locally, a Jewish student group was on a call with a White House official when the meeting was “bombed” earlier this month and a Chinese class at a Newton high school was also targeted, he said, two of “well over a dozen” such complaints in the state.
We know who is at the bottom of all this, and the Globe confirms it every day.
Another local pastor, the Rev. Laura Everett, said on Twitter she was also affected by an attack earlier in the month, and blamed Zoom for the vulnerabilities of its product.
“I’m trying to pray online with a wounded people during a freaking pandemic. I hate how anxious I feel about logging in to @zoom_us after I got #Zoombombed. The doors of the Church should be open to every weary soul. I’m trying to do my job. I need Zoom to do theirs," she said.
Nothing like this has happened in the five years that Amico has been a minister at the Protestant congregation, which traces its roots back to 1629, he said.
Amico, who grew up in Saugus, said the closest thing to it was when he was a minister at a predominantly gay congregation in the Midwest when protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church, which the Anti-Defamation League has called a “virulently homophobic, anti-Semitic hate group," arrived outside the door during a service.
“We went out on back steps and sang gospel hymns and asked them to come in,” Amico said, but on Sunday, there was nothing he could do. “They’re not people that you can reason with.”
Instead, the predominantly white, middle-class congregation quickly started a new Zoom call and went back to worshiping, including a prayer for those that disrupted the service, he said, and Zoom services will continue, Amico said, protected by a password that feels slightly antithetical to the openness of the church he ministers to.
“There [is] always going to be evil in the world or those that want to cause problems and have issues,” he said. “We have to do the best we can to be who we are and not worry about them.”
Forget fighting them, huh?
--more--"
That reeks of a false flag, and I'm sure it will soon disappear down the memory hole like the others.
Related:
"A Republican state senator in Michigan apologized for wearing a homemade mask that resembled the Confederate battle flag on the Senate floor. “I’m sorry for my choice of pattern on the face mask I wore yesterday,” the senator, Dale Zorn, said in a statement released Saturday, adding he did not intend to offend anyone. Zorn said he told his wife, who made the mask, that it “probably will raise some eyebrows,” but he initially told TV station WLNS on Friday that it was not a Confederate flag. He said his wife told him the mask’s pattern was “more similar to” the state flags of Kentucky or Tennessee. The mask he wore, however, appeared to have more in common with the Confederate battle flag, which is all red and features a blue “X” with white stars inside it drawn across the flag. Zorn, who could not be reached Sunday, told WLNS that the history of the Confederate battle flag should be taught in schools....."
Look like an agent provocateur to me, even if he does advocate facing up to history.
Also see:
"A Louisiana pastor is holding services in his church, defying house arrest orders that followed an assault charge related to his decision to hold mass gatherings in defiance of public health orders during the pandemic. A livestream from Life Tabernacle Church Sunday showed Tony Spell walking among more than 100 congregants, often repeating the phrase, “I’ve just got to get to Jesus. . . . Come on America, let’s get back to Jesus.” Nearly all parishioners were not wearing face masks, and social distancing was not being practiced. The police department in Central, a suburb of Baton Rouge, says on its Facebook page that Spell turned himself in last week on charges of assault and improper backing. Last Sunday, Spell drove a church bus in reverse in the direction of a sign-holding protester. Spell already faces misdemeanor charges for holding in-person church services despite the ban on gatherings."
That is when he let out the service.
"Assisted-living sites struggle with coronavirus in shadow of nursing home crisis" by Robert Weisman Globe Staff, April 26, 2020
As the coronavirus sweeps through Massachusetts nursing homes, leaving a trail of deaths that now tops 1,600, a parallel crisis has been playing out with far less scrutiny in another setting housing vulnerable seniors: assisted living.
Massachusetts officials have been quietly tracking COVID-19 cases and deaths in the state’s 260 assisted-living facilities — many of which contain memory care units — since last month. Word had trickled out of outbreaks at Boston-area residences, such as Sunrise of Arlington, The Falls at Cordingly Dam in Newton, and Goddard House in Brookline.
On Friday, for the first time, officials posted a list of sites with two or more cases. The list, like the one posted for nursing homes, only includes a range of cases for each assisted-living residence, not an actual number, and it doesn’t disclose deaths at the sites, but it shows 139, more than half the total, have two infections, including a dozen with 30 or more.
Deaths at nursing homes and rest homes make up 56.3 percent of overall coronavirus deaths in Massachusetts as of Sunday, according to the state’s tally, but the Baker administration doesn’t include assisted-living deaths in that tally, which means it understates — perhaps significantly — the extent to which senior housing facilities lie at the heart of the public health crisis.
Upon the turn-in, I'm thinking lying Jew, sorry.
Some elected officials want the state to disclose more.
He talked to state Representative Ruth Balser, a Newton Democrat who filed a bill that passed in the House of Representatives last week and is now before the Senate. Governor Charlie Baker hasn’t said whether he would sign it.
State officials began deploying National Guard technicians to assisted-living centers on April 13 as part of a mobile testing program. Dozens of deaths have been confirmed by assisted-living operators in response to press inquiries, but the death count at many Massachusetts facilities is unknown.
That frightened the shit out of them.
Assisted-living communities tend to be more affluent than nursing homes. In contrast to nursing homes, which have about 38,000 residents covered mostly through MassHealth, the state Medicaid program, most assisted-living residents pay monthly fees by drawing on savings, pensions, Social Security, or from selling homes.
Look, I'm not going to keep hyperventilating over the Globe being a $tinking eliti$t paper. It's useful as far as it goes.
While they’re designed to be more residential than institutional, and don’t provide 24-hour skilled nursing, assisted-living facilities — where older residents live together in close quarters and often need help eating or bathing — are proving susceptible to the highly transmissible virus.
Like nursing homes, assisted-living operators have varied widely in how they’ve communicated with residents, families, and the public about their coronavirus exposure. While some have been open from the start, others have tightly controlled information, telling only the families of residents testing positive or sometimes keeping even them in the dark.
Ellen McDonald, a Tufts University research librarian who was a friend and guardian to 92-year-old Norma Ricci, said her friend’s assisted-living residence, Sunrise of Arlington, told her April 1 that a nurse who worked on Ricci’s floor had been infected. A week later, McDonald was told Ricci was rushed to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, but there was no mention of coronavirus. The next day, Mount Auburn called to say Ricci had COVID-19. McDonald donned full protective garb to visit her friend on Easter. Ricci died three days later.
McDonald said Sunrise nurses told her many residents were coughing and some staffers had stopped coming to work, but there was no official word from management.
“People need to know the conditions their moms and dads and loved ones are living under,” said a frustrated McDonald, who had been a Lexington friend and neighbor of Ricci for more than three decades before becoming her guardian. “I told [Sunrise] that, even if they couldn’t tell us who’s sick, we needed to understand what was happening there.”
See:
"Braemoor Health Center is a modest nursing home in Brockton, licensed to care for 120 residents, but Larry Lipschutz, who owns the property, was able to wring $1.8 million in pay out of it last year, according to state records. His son, Avi “Zisha” Lipschutz, who holds the state license to run the nursing home, extracted nearly $900,000 from Braemoor as payments to a realty company and four management firms he owns. As the owners were taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of Braemoor, the nursing home racked up three and a half times as many health and safety problems as the state average, federal documents show. Over the past year, a portrait has emerged of substandard care in many of the nursing homes run by Braemoor’s owner, Synergy Health Centers. Poor treatment of patients’ festering pressure sores. Medication errors. Inadequate staff training. Now, a Globe investigation shows that as father and son were paying themselves handsomely, Synergy apparently provided false information when applying for nursing home licenses. Synergy’s cofounders, through their public relations firm, declined to respond to a detailed list of questions about the company’s operations and owners. Requests for interviews made in person at the company’s New Jersey headquarters and with a company lawyer went unanswered. Three former Synergy employees describe Zisha Lipschutz as an ardent New England Patriots fan and high-energy boss. One former employee and one current worker said Lipschutz would rally his managers during meetings by quoting or showing scenes from “Mad Men,” a TV series about a 1960s-era Madison Avenue advertising firm. The former employees and the current employee declined to be identified because they still work in the nursing home industry and said they feared that being identified could affect their careers. The related management and realty companies associated with the nursing homes Zisha Lipschutz and Newmark co-own took in more than $7 million in 2014, according to a review of financial records Synergy filed with Massachusetts regulators. Both men received bachelor’s degrees in Talmudic law, according to resumes included in their state nursing home licensing application and verified by the Globe. Two other former staffers described coveted Patriots playoff tickets Synergy bought in January 2013 — one month after acquiring its first facility in Sunderland. The company spent roughly $25,000 on a suite at Gillette Stadium and invited local doctors and nurses to help woo more business for its new facility, the staffers said. “It really offended me because I had to do battle to get basic nursing supplies,” said one of the former staffers who still works in the industry and asked to remain anonymous. In the months following that playoff game, the company cut back on the quality of adult diapers and fresh fruit at its Sunderland facility, according to a former volunteer state ombudsman and government records, and was cited by state investigators for more than a dozen violations......"
Related:
"No visits. They know it’s necessary. They trust the caregivers to keep their loved ones safe, but for families of residents at Boston-area senior living communities, all of which have barred visitors for more than a week now to keep the coronavirus at bay, the separation feels cruel and painful. Nursing homes and assisted-living facilities have embraced federal and state health guidance that keeps adult sons and daughters, grandchildren, and friends outside closed doors for the foreseeable future to protect a population deemed at highest risk for COVID-19, the potentially deadly respiratory ailment caused by the coronavirus......"
We are sorry, your loved one died of coronavirus.
Director of Nurses Lea Poulin danced outside of The Leonard Florence Center for Living with residents and other staff members when a band performed outside so residents could listen from their windows and balconies. (Erin Clark/Globe Staff)
The evil is so in your face! They are literally dancing in the streets at your deaths!
That's who is running the nursing homes and taking care of your beloved old folks.
Do you trust them?
In a statement, Sunrise Senior Living said nine residents of its Arlington facility have died and 25 have tested positive. The statement said Sunrise has regularly updated residents and families by phone and e-mail. It quoted a regional vice president, Thomas Kessler, as saying, “Communication has always been a source of pride at Sunrise of Arlington.”
Benchmark Senior Living, a Waltham operator that runs a chain of assisted-living communities across the Northeast, has been public about outbreaks at its facilities.
In the state’s worst known assisted-living outbreak, 21 residents have died at the Cordingly Dam site in Newton. Benchmark chief executive Tom Grape declined an interview request. A spokeswoman said he is focused on “protecting the health and safety of Benchmark’s residents and associates" and keeping its communities up to date.
Communication is especially important to families of assisted-living residents with dementia, who often don’t understand the threat they face or why their loved ones no longer visit.
“They’re frightened of being alone,” said Sue FitzPatrick of Medford, a facilitator of an Alzheimer’s Association support group — now forced to meet via Zoom — for families of people with dementia, some of whom are in assisted-living sites. “If their families can talk to them on FaceTime, they’ll say, ‘When can you come to see me?’ If you explain [the pandemic] to them, they’ll forget it five minutes later.”
Yeah, they would be better off dead, huh?
The EVIL is making my HYPERVENTILATE!
The state’s delay in disclosing assisted-living data may have stemmed from a patchwork regulatory system for senior housing. While skilled nursing facilities are licensed by the state Department of Public Health, assisted-living facilities are certified by the Executive Office of Elder Affairs and have been using a reporting system different than the DPH’s.
State spokesman Tom Lyons said officials wanted to make sure data from assisted-living sites was complete before posting. “We are providing one of the most comprehensive daily data reports of any state in the country," he said.
PFFFFT!
Because assisted-living sites aren’t considered medical facilities, they’re more lightly regulated. The residential model is only about 30 years old, and the regulatory structure was established in Massachusetts in 1995. Since then, the sector has grown even as the number of nursing homes in the state has shrunk by about a third.
Brian Doherty, president of the assisted-living association, said residents typically have their own apartments, and have customized service and care plans built into their monthly fees, which can vary widely. Most residents pay privately.
The more spacious living quarters, and precautions taken by assisted-living residences at the outset of the pandemic, haven’t spared the facilities from the coronavirus.
“Our members are already reporting every positive case [to the elder affairs office] for residents and staff,” Doherty said. “We look forward to helping the state collect that data.”
They killed an economy when they had nothing but models, no data!
Among those at highest risk are residents living with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia and live in memory care units in their communities, or in residences serving dementia residents exclusively.
The health crisis, which has closed facilities to visitors for the past six weeks, has left many residents isolated and scared, say family members and advocates, especially at sites that have had to move residents into “Covid-positive” or “Covid-negative” wings.
“COVID-19 has created a lot of upheaval in these facilities,” said Susan Antkowiak, vice president at the Massachusetts and New Hampshire chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, “and the fact that loved ones can’t come in to see them now makes it very depressing.”
Breathe then.
--more--"
Time to pray to the porcelain God:
"Church donations have plunged because of the coronavirus. Some churches won’t survive" by Michelle Boorstein Washington Post, April 25, 2020
Pastor J. Artie Stuckey has cut or eliminated every staff salary at his small Mississippi church. He’s nervously watching the payments for the building where Restoration Baptist meets. He reminds his congregation to keep tithing, but he knows many of them — the barber, the electrician, the musician — have also seen their finances rocked by the pandemic shutdown.
Stuckey, a 42-year-old who sold cars until ministry called him 15 years ago, is sympathetic to being cash-strapped. Restoration wasn’t in great financial shape even before the virus wiped out more than 50 percent of its weekly offerings, but now the 65-member evangelical church outside Jackson is in survival mode. Which, to Stuckey, feels like a test of faith.
‘‘I made a commitment to God, to my people. We’ve been teaching and preaching faith. Anyone can be a leader, but if you’re a faith leader, what do we do?’’ he asked. ‘‘Do we fold, or do we become a living example of what we’ve preached for so many years?’’
The novel coronavirus is pressing painfully on the soft underbelly of US houses of worship: their finances. About a third of all congregations have no savings, according to the 2018-19 National Congregations Study.
That is WAR TERMINOLOGY, and it is GODDAMN OFFENSIVE!
At least Bezo's mouthpiece is making it clear that the RULING CLA$$ has in fact declared WAR ON US and is SEEKING TO EXTERMINATE US!!!
The blow has been hardest on the nation’s many small congregations (about half of US congregations are the size of Stuckey’s or smaller). Some experts think the coronavirus could reshape the country’s religious landscape and wipe out many small houses of worship. These are places where members typically go to seek guidance and comfort, but members are now finding closed buildings and desperate pleas for funds.
The synagogues will be fine!
With funding at about 65 percent of normal, Rev. Rickey Scott, pastor of the 175-member East St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church outside Oxford, Miss., has cut all of his staff. The region has poor connectivity, many people lack money to pay for devices to connect to the Internet, and some are older and uncomfortable with the technology.
‘‘I see my psychological effect like that of the Apostle Paul when he was in prison, to the Philippians,’’ he said, citing writings attributed to an imprisoned Paul sending a message to a community of Christians in Greece.
‘‘I feel I’m in spiritual solitary confinement. For the sake of Jesus Christ, I have to endure this suffering.’’
He would carry his own cross to crucifixion along with the rest of his sheeple.
What bankrupted churches and congregations will do is destroy another organized resistance to what is happening.
You have to give the evil psychopath f***s their due; they planned this well.
It’s too early to know how hard houses of worship ultimately will be hit, and clergy say a lot depends on how long giving is disrupted.
Patrick Markey, executive director of the Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference, said most Catholic dioceses were able to apply for aid made available this spring by the Small Business Administration to help with paying salaries.
Are you flipping kidding me?
Where is the $eparation of Church and $tate?
Those perverts got a f**king bailout to pay salaries because Catholici$m is a $mall bu$ine$$!
I'm so glad I excommunicated myself from that cabal.
That's where my pre$$ walked out on the sermon, and how is that audit of the Vatican Bank going?
Scott said he applied for the SBA money but did not get any. Stuckey did not apply.
Typically US Hindu temples collect money when worshipers come throughout the week to pray and make offerings or when priests go to their homes to perform special blessings. Many smaller temples are staying open to do the required prayers with skeleton staffing even as no visitors come to donate.
Among them is the Sri Panchamukha Hanuman Temple in Los Angeles; this month, it put out an urgent Facebook appeal for financial help. ‘‘There are no devotees. The temple is completely closed,’’ the priest, Sriman Narasimhacharya Cherukupally, says in the appeal video, with a large representation of the Hindu deity Hanuman behind him. ‘‘Please be with us, with your kind heart, and protect and save your temple.’’
In addition to the federal payroll protection program, there are private efforts. Among them is a nonprofit named Churches Helping Churches, which is collecting money from larger congregations, foundations, and individuals to help smaller churches. It has received 850 applications since opening the first week of April.
Related:
"nonprofits provide new ways for corporations and individuals to influence"
As if they needed any more.
You know they are tax-exempt, too?
How charitable -- to them$elves!
Clergy are making hard choices in the meantime.
The Rev. Chris Butler oversees three small congregations in the Chicago area. One, in South Holland, has experienced a drop of 70 percent in giving. Another, which has about 30 members and had been based at a city McDonald’s, has shifted to group conference prayer by phone. Giving remains steady at Butler’s Hyde Park congregation, which for now is helping sustain the overall operation, he said. He also has received some aid from Churches Helping Churches. ‘‘I think the financial situation is going to be all right. I just believe in God’s provision,’’ he said.
You mean this guy?
Indeed, some clergy see the virus as a divinely inspired challenge, a chance to refocus on the core of their faith, to purify, to pray in the quiet, to worry less about building funds and costly programming and to think more about getting out and helping the needy, about evangelizing.
Some say the virus may speed up a cruel evolution — the end of congregations that have not embraced technology for functions including streaming services, paying bills, and using cloud computing. That includes congregations with members who can’t afford devices or connectivity. The virus is also forcing a reckoning about the way younger Americans give — sporadically, not weekly as older churchgoers do.
Yeah, you will be raptured up to the data-collecting clouds of the NSA and CIA!
They are your God now!
The Rev. C.J. Rhodes of Mount Helm Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., said 20 percent to 30 percent of his 165 members are uncomfortable with electronic technology and avoid going online, which has made it more challenging to be in touch with them during the viral outbreak. The biggest cost, he said, has been the emotional and mental impact on the older members who depend on the church for social interaction and support.
God bless them, for they will have to be eliminated.
Rhodes said he thinks the virus will trigger a religious revival once people come back together, but Stuckey is trying to find the right tone. He has building payments to make, a six-person crew that is not getting regular salaries, and he’s still hustling to put on livestreamed and drive-in services, to make calls to those who are hurting. He knows there are congregants who are not working and can’t give, while others are still getting paid. He has seen people posting on social media, saying the church shouldn’t be asking for money at all during a crisis.
We won't be coming back together again.
‘‘What I try to say is ‘The Lord is aware of your situation,’ ’’ Stuckey said. ‘‘We survive on generosity. If people stop giving, we die.’’
--more--"
To see what is happening at Mississippi churches, see if you can find one of the video links early in the post. The pastor will set you straight in a bitchute.
"Salem church service tightens Zoom services after racist video attack" by Lucas Phillips Globe Correspondent, April 25, 2020
A Salem church is holding its first service with extra security measures Sunday, a week after its virtual gathering was disrupted by racial slurs and images of a burning cross, according to police and the church.
Oh, no, the stench of a self-inflicted, agenda-pushing piece of propaganda and false flag!
Salem police confirmed Saturday that they are investigating a “zoombombing” incident at the Tabernacle Church on April 19 and have been in contact with the FBI.
They are already Zooming in on suspects.
The Rev. Joseph Amico said a member of the congregation was about to address the 60 to 70 people who had joined the Zoom service to invite them to make baked goods for a local homeless shelter, when multiple unknown users blitzed the meeting’s moderator with meeting permission requests, and eventually took control of the call.
In a video of the call, shared with the Globe, the image of Amico in the pulpit was abruptly replaced by a video of the Klu Klux Klan burning a cross, while a song played using a racial epithet.
“We’re getting bombed,” the preacher, Holly Brauner, said in the recording, as a moderator tried to get what appeared to be three ill-intentioned users off the call. One was visible, a white man wearing a bandana over his mouth and dancing to the song in a desk chair. In about a minute, the Zoom meeting was ended.
More WAR TERMINOLOGY!
“I think at first everyone was just in shock,” Amico said in a phone interview Saturday, “and then people were horrified by the images and what they were hearing."
According to Robert Trestan, the New England director of the Anti-Defamation League, hundreds of incidents like the one in Salem have been reported all around the country, as COVID-19 moves most gatherings online.
“What’s really troubling is people are really going out of their way to disrupt these people meetings virtually,” he said in a phone interview.
Locally, a Jewish student group was on a call with a White House official when the meeting was “bombed” earlier this month and a Chinese class at a Newton high school was also targeted, he said, two of “well over a dozen” such complaints in the state.
We know who is at the bottom of all this, and the Globe confirms it every day.
Another local pastor, the Rev. Laura Everett, said on Twitter she was also affected by an attack earlier in the month, and blamed Zoom for the vulnerabilities of its product.
“I’m trying to pray online with a wounded people during a freaking pandemic. I hate how anxious I feel about logging in to @zoom_us after I got #Zoombombed. The doors of the Church should be open to every weary soul. I’m trying to do my job. I need Zoom to do theirs," she said.
Nothing like this has happened in the five years that Amico has been a minister at the Protestant congregation, which traces its roots back to 1629, he said.
Amico, who grew up in Saugus, said the closest thing to it was when he was a minister at a predominantly gay congregation in the Midwest when protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church, which the Anti-Defamation League has called a “virulently homophobic, anti-Semitic hate group," arrived outside the door during a service.
“We went out on back steps and sang gospel hymns and asked them to come in,” Amico said, but on Sunday, there was nothing he could do. “They’re not people that you can reason with.”
Instead, the predominantly white, middle-class congregation quickly started a new Zoom call and went back to worshiping, including a prayer for those that disrupted the service, he said, and Zoom services will continue, Amico said, protected by a password that feels slightly antithetical to the openness of the church he ministers to.
“There [is] always going to be evil in the world or those that want to cause problems and have issues,” he said. “We have to do the best we can to be who we are and not worry about them.”
Forget fighting them, huh?
--more--"
That reeks of a false flag, and I'm sure it will soon disappear down the memory hole like the others.
Related:
"A Republican state senator in Michigan apologized for wearing a homemade mask that resembled the Confederate battle flag on the Senate floor. “I’m sorry for my choice of pattern on the face mask I wore yesterday,” the senator, Dale Zorn, said in a statement released Saturday, adding he did not intend to offend anyone. Zorn said he told his wife, who made the mask, that it “probably will raise some eyebrows,” but he initially told TV station WLNS on Friday that it was not a Confederate flag. He said his wife told him the mask’s pattern was “more similar to” the state flags of Kentucky or Tennessee. The mask he wore, however, appeared to have more in common with the Confederate battle flag, which is all red and features a blue “X” with white stars inside it drawn across the flag. Zorn, who could not be reached Sunday, told WLNS that the history of the Confederate battle flag should be taught in schools....."
Look like an agent provocateur to me, even if he does advocate facing up to history.
Also see:
"A Louisiana pastor is holding services in his church, defying house arrest orders that followed an assault charge related to his decision to hold mass gatherings in defiance of public health orders during the pandemic. A livestream from Life Tabernacle Church Sunday showed Tony Spell walking among more than 100 congregants, often repeating the phrase, “I’ve just got to get to Jesus. . . . Come on America, let’s get back to Jesus.” Nearly all parishioners were not wearing face masks, and social distancing was not being practiced. The police department in Central, a suburb of Baton Rouge, says on its Facebook page that Spell turned himself in last week on charges of assault and improper backing. Last Sunday, Spell drove a church bus in reverse in the direction of a sign-holding protester. Spell already faces misdemeanor charges for holding in-person church services despite the ban on gatherings."
That is when he let out the service.
"Assisted-living sites struggle with coronavirus in shadow of nursing home crisis" by Robert Weisman Globe Staff, April 26, 2020
As the coronavirus sweeps through Massachusetts nursing homes, leaving a trail of deaths that now tops 1,600, a parallel crisis has been playing out with far less scrutiny in another setting housing vulnerable seniors: assisted living.
Massachusetts officials have been quietly tracking COVID-19 cases and deaths in the state’s 260 assisted-living facilities — many of which contain memory care units — since last month. Word had trickled out of outbreaks at Boston-area residences, such as Sunrise of Arlington, The Falls at Cordingly Dam in Newton, and Goddard House in Brookline.
On Friday, for the first time, officials posted a list of sites with two or more cases. The list, like the one posted for nursing homes, only includes a range of cases for each assisted-living residence, not an actual number, and it doesn’t disclose deaths at the sites, but it shows 139, more than half the total, have two infections, including a dozen with 30 or more.
Deaths at nursing homes and rest homes make up 56.3 percent of overall coronavirus deaths in Massachusetts as of Sunday, according to the state’s tally, but the Baker administration doesn’t include assisted-living deaths in that tally, which means it understates — perhaps significantly — the extent to which senior housing facilities lie at the heart of the public health crisis.
Upon the turn-in, I'm thinking lying Jew, sorry.
Some elected officials want the state to disclose more.
He talked to state Representative Ruth Balser, a Newton Democrat who filed a bill that passed in the House of Representatives last week and is now before the Senate. Governor Charlie Baker hasn’t said whether he would sign it.
State officials began deploying National Guard technicians to assisted-living centers on April 13 as part of a mobile testing program. Dozens of deaths have been confirmed by assisted-living operators in response to press inquiries, but the death count at many Massachusetts facilities is unknown.
That frightened the shit out of them.
Assisted-living communities tend to be more affluent than nursing homes. In contrast to nursing homes, which have about 38,000 residents covered mostly through MassHealth, the state Medicaid program, most assisted-living residents pay monthly fees by drawing on savings, pensions, Social Security, or from selling homes.
Look, I'm not going to keep hyperventilating over the Globe being a $tinking eliti$t paper. It's useful as far as it goes.
While they’re designed to be more residential than institutional, and don’t provide 24-hour skilled nursing, assisted-living facilities — where older residents live together in close quarters and often need help eating or bathing — are proving susceptible to the highly transmissible virus.
Like nursing homes, assisted-living operators have varied widely in how they’ve communicated with residents, families, and the public about their coronavirus exposure. While some have been open from the start, others have tightly controlled information, telling only the families of residents testing positive or sometimes keeping even them in the dark.
Ellen McDonald, a Tufts University research librarian who was a friend and guardian to 92-year-old Norma Ricci, said her friend’s assisted-living residence, Sunrise of Arlington, told her April 1 that a nurse who worked on Ricci’s floor had been infected. A week later, McDonald was told Ricci was rushed to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, but there was no mention of coronavirus. The next day, Mount Auburn called to say Ricci had COVID-19. McDonald donned full protective garb to visit her friend on Easter. Ricci died three days later.
McDonald said Sunrise nurses told her many residents were coughing and some staffers had stopped coming to work, but there was no official word from management.
“People need to know the conditions their moms and dads and loved ones are living under,” said a frustrated McDonald, who had been a Lexington friend and neighbor of Ricci for more than three decades before becoming her guardian. “I told [Sunrise] that, even if they couldn’t tell us who’s sick, we needed to understand what was happening there.”
See:
"Braemoor Health Center is a modest nursing home in Brockton, licensed to care for 120 residents, but Larry Lipschutz, who owns the property, was able to wring $1.8 million in pay out of it last year, according to state records. His son, Avi “Zisha” Lipschutz, who holds the state license to run the nursing home, extracted nearly $900,000 from Braemoor as payments to a realty company and four management firms he owns. As the owners were taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of Braemoor, the nursing home racked up three and a half times as many health and safety problems as the state average, federal documents show. Over the past year, a portrait has emerged of substandard care in many of the nursing homes run by Braemoor’s owner, Synergy Health Centers. Poor treatment of patients’ festering pressure sores. Medication errors. Inadequate staff training. Now, a Globe investigation shows that as father and son were paying themselves handsomely, Synergy apparently provided false information when applying for nursing home licenses. Synergy’s cofounders, through their public relations firm, declined to respond to a detailed list of questions about the company’s operations and owners. Requests for interviews made in person at the company’s New Jersey headquarters and with a company lawyer went unanswered. Three former Synergy employees describe Zisha Lipschutz as an ardent New England Patriots fan and high-energy boss. One former employee and one current worker said Lipschutz would rally his managers during meetings by quoting or showing scenes from “Mad Men,” a TV series about a 1960s-era Madison Avenue advertising firm. The former employees and the current employee declined to be identified because they still work in the nursing home industry and said they feared that being identified could affect their careers. The related management and realty companies associated with the nursing homes Zisha Lipschutz and Newmark co-own took in more than $7 million in 2014, according to a review of financial records Synergy filed with Massachusetts regulators. Both men received bachelor’s degrees in Talmudic law, according to resumes included in their state nursing home licensing application and verified by the Globe. Two other former staffers described coveted Patriots playoff tickets Synergy bought in January 2013 — one month after acquiring its first facility in Sunderland. The company spent roughly $25,000 on a suite at Gillette Stadium and invited local doctors and nurses to help woo more business for its new facility, the staffers said. “It really offended me because I had to do battle to get basic nursing supplies,” said one of the former staffers who still works in the industry and asked to remain anonymous. In the months following that playoff game, the company cut back on the quality of adult diapers and fresh fruit at its Sunderland facility, according to a former volunteer state ombudsman and government records, and was cited by state investigators for more than a dozen violations......"
Related:
"No visits. They know it’s necessary. They trust the caregivers to keep their loved ones safe, but for families of residents at Boston-area senior living communities, all of which have barred visitors for more than a week now to keep the coronavirus at bay, the separation feels cruel and painful. Nursing homes and assisted-living facilities have embraced federal and state health guidance that keeps adult sons and daughters, grandchildren, and friends outside closed doors for the foreseeable future to protect a population deemed at highest risk for COVID-19, the potentially deadly respiratory ailment caused by the coronavirus......"
We are sorry, your loved one died of coronavirus.
Director of Nurses Lea Poulin danced outside of The Leonard Florence Center for Living with residents and other staff members when a band performed outside so residents could listen from their windows and balconies. (Erin Clark/Globe Staff)
The evil is so in your face! They are literally dancing in the streets at your deaths!
That's who is running the nursing homes and taking care of your beloved old folks.
Do you trust them?
In a statement, Sunrise Senior Living said nine residents of its Arlington facility have died and 25 have tested positive. The statement said Sunrise has regularly updated residents and families by phone and e-mail. It quoted a regional vice president, Thomas Kessler, as saying, “Communication has always been a source of pride at Sunrise of Arlington.”
Benchmark Senior Living, a Waltham operator that runs a chain of assisted-living communities across the Northeast, has been public about outbreaks at its facilities.
In the state’s worst known assisted-living outbreak, 21 residents have died at the Cordingly Dam site in Newton. Benchmark chief executive Tom Grape declined an interview request. A spokeswoman said he is focused on “protecting the health and safety of Benchmark’s residents and associates" and keeping its communities up to date.
Communication is especially important to families of assisted-living residents with dementia, who often don’t understand the threat they face or why their loved ones no longer visit.
“They’re frightened of being alone,” said Sue FitzPatrick of Medford, a facilitator of an Alzheimer’s Association support group — now forced to meet via Zoom — for families of people with dementia, some of whom are in assisted-living sites. “If their families can talk to them on FaceTime, they’ll say, ‘When can you come to see me?’ If you explain [the pandemic] to them, they’ll forget it five minutes later.”
Yeah, they would be better off dead, huh?
The EVIL is making my HYPERVENTILATE!
The state’s delay in disclosing assisted-living data may have stemmed from a patchwork regulatory system for senior housing. While skilled nursing facilities are licensed by the state Department of Public Health, assisted-living facilities are certified by the Executive Office of Elder Affairs and have been using a reporting system different than the DPH’s.
State spokesman Tom Lyons said officials wanted to make sure data from assisted-living sites was complete before posting. “We are providing one of the most comprehensive daily data reports of any state in the country," he said.
PFFFFT!
Because assisted-living sites aren’t considered medical facilities, they’re more lightly regulated. The residential model is only about 30 years old, and the regulatory structure was established in Massachusetts in 1995. Since then, the sector has grown even as the number of nursing homes in the state has shrunk by about a third.
Brian Doherty, president of the assisted-living association, said residents typically have their own apartments, and have customized service and care plans built into their monthly fees, which can vary widely. Most residents pay privately.
The more spacious living quarters, and precautions taken by assisted-living residences at the outset of the pandemic, haven’t spared the facilities from the coronavirus.
“Our members are already reporting every positive case [to the elder affairs office] for residents and staff,” Doherty said. “We look forward to helping the state collect that data.”
They killed an economy when they had nothing but models, no data!
Among those at highest risk are residents living with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia and live in memory care units in their communities, or in residences serving dementia residents exclusively.
The health crisis, which has closed facilities to visitors for the past six weeks, has left many residents isolated and scared, say family members and advocates, especially at sites that have had to move residents into “Covid-positive” or “Covid-negative” wings.
“COVID-19 has created a lot of upheaval in these facilities,” said Susan Antkowiak, vice president at the Massachusetts and New Hampshire chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, “and the fact that loved ones can’t come in to see them now makes it very depressing.”
Breathe then.
--more--"
