"Government actions, guidance fail to keep pace with health crisis in nursing homes; Operators struggle to fend off virus, unintended consequences of state moves" by Robert Weisman and Laura Krantz Globe Staff, April 18, 2020
Earlier this month, Governor Charlie Baker activated a dozen National Guard teams to test for COVID-19 at hard-hit nursing homes across Massachusetts in an effort to help them contain the deadly outbreak, yet soon after the Guard completed its testing, managers of the homes noticed a disturbing trend: Large numbers of front-line employees stopped coming to work, leaving their beleaguered facilities severely understaffed.
“The National Guard has been wonderful, but when staff sees them come in their hazmat suits, that puts the fear of the virus in everyone,” said Zo Long, regional division vice president for Life Care Centers of America, which has lost 75 employees at its Nashoba Valley nursing home alone because they are either ill or worried about getting the virus. “You have people quitting on the spot or calling in sick.”
The middle of that paragraph was where the turn-in came, and upon turning in I am greeted with this:
Members of the Massachusetts National Guard removed their hazmat suits after leaving Alliance Health at Marina Bay in Quincy this month. The National Guard was deployed to assist nursing homes with COVID-19 testing. (Stan Grossfeld/ Globe Staff).
I don't blame them for freaking out.
The unintended consequences of the Baker administration’s mobile testing program were just one more blow to embattled nursing home operators, who say the state and federal response has failed to keep pace with the crisis. Public health guidance, they say, has been well-meaning but constantly changing — often coming late, not matching the scope of the problem, or not working as intended.
They weren't in that great a shape to begin with, and remember years ago when they were feeding dozens of psychotropic pharmaceuticals to them all to keep them passive? Allegedly ended after Congre$$ got involved, but I doubt it. Probably putting them to death now like you would a dead man walking. That's a terrible thing to say, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility given the monsters we are dealing with. To them, trauma is a weapon against us freedom- and peace-loving people.
Frank Romano, chief executive of Essex Group, which owns eight nursing and assisted living homes in the state, likened it to his experience in war, when orders that came from the distant high command made no sense to those in the field.
“I tell everyone, this is like when I was in Vietnam,” Romano said. “Some of the directives were absolutely ridiculous. You have to let the people in the field make the best decisions because they are dealing with it. Not a bunch of bureaucrats who mean well and think they are doing the right thing.”
Like Fauci and Birx?
Romano and his peers have been scrambling to access desperately needed testing, staff, and equipment to fight the pandemic, which has killed 810 residents of long-term care facilities in Massachusetts — accounting for 52 percent of the state’s coronavirus deaths.
I don't know about those numbers, and I don't know how many would have died or died of primary causes other than COVID. My sense is every single death in the state right now is being presumed to be from COVID.
In interviews last week, nursing home operators — some speaking openly and others on condition of anonymity to avoid offending families of residents and public officials — described the pandemic as the most devastating crisis of their careers, as they seek to comfort distraught residents and families while bucking up nervous staffers.
Now, some of them were riddled with corruption and behavior I mentioned above; however, one does need to recognize what a vital service they were and are providing humanity. That's a the humanity with heart. I don't know what the immediate or long-term future holds or how this will all shake out in the end. I just wanted to make my feelings clear on the matter.
Families and public officials have blamed nursing home operators for lax infection control, poor communications, and initially failing to require staff to wear masks and other protective gear, but many operators say they’ve done their best, and public officials have failed to provide meaningful help. “What we hear from the state officials sounds great, but it’s hard to bring it down to where we’re operating," said Rich Bane, president of Braintree-based BaneCare Management, which runs a dozen nursing homes in the state.
I was just going to say that I have great respect for what families say, but the "public officials" can cram it at this point. If nothing else, they allow the conduct and then when it becomes exposed to the public they turn on the institution and start playing the CYOA blame game while starting an "investigation."
Last week, for instance, the state announced a new digital long-term care portal to help short-staffed facilities recruit registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and other workers to care for patients through the ongoing crisis, but some operators advertising for jobs on the site said it proved useless in helping them identify candidates to fill the 40 percent of nursing home jobs that are now vacant. “We put in dozens of jobs, and got zero inquiries,” said Bane.
That is the state I know so well!
Beyond that, all this AI and let's do everything online isn't getting it done for me. I don't want my elder being taken care of that way, do you? As fallible is the human condition, I would rather take my chances with a person who has a beating heart when it comes to the care and attention they need.
Will mistakes me made? Yeah? Are some souls in and of themselves evil? Yup. You just have to take your chances because it isn't the vast majority. The beloved elder is not going to be comforted by a f***ing robot or machine. It's worse than the Guard showing up in a hazmat suit.
For weeks, nursing home operators contended that state guidance on testing, which followed federal guidelines set by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was too little, too late; they struggled to get patients tested so they could contain the virus’s spread. Even when the Baker administration last week finally promised a one-time “baseline” testing for all residents and workers, critics insisted only repeated testing will identify who has been infected.
I don't like anyone following their guidelines at this point. Kennedy had it right. They are an agent for the vaccine companies.
On a recent phone call with nursing home operators, state officials lauded the National Guard testing program, but some operators on the call told them it took two days to get National Guard technicians in their buildings and another two days to get results. In a life-or-death situation, that was time they didn’t have.
Health officials “seemed to be unaware that the whole system had broken down,” said Dr. Larissa Lucas, of the North Shore Physicians Group, who serves as medical director for nursing homes in Peabody, Lynn, and Marblehead.
Even steps sought by operators have gone awry. Some told state officials last week that a move intended to help nursing homes fill jobs by lifting a cap on wages for temporary employees prompted temp agencies to try to lure away the homes’ already depleted full-time staffers with higher pay. Earlier, some homes abandoned a state-orchestrated plan to relocate residents and turn their facilities into recovery centers for hospital patients after infections cropped up at the sites before the moves.
In an interview, Marylou Sudders, the Massachusetts health and human services secretary, defended the state’s actions and guidance, but she said health officials in Massachusetts and elsewhere are adapting constantly as they learn more about how the virus is spreading and who it’s impacting.
“It’s an extraordinarily stressful time for the long-term care industry,” Sudders said. “We’re trying to do everything possible, as the pandemic evolves, to be responsive." The administration’s message to the nursing homes is, she said, “We’re working for you, and we’re in this with you.”
No they are not.
Sudders acknowledged some state moves, such as a recommendation that nursing homes adopt a no-visits policy, came after federal regulators had already acted, but she said the state has expanded its mobile testing capabilities, through the National Guard, private labs, and emergency services, and is now getting faster results. Many operators “appreciated the National Guard coming in,“ Sudders said, but the state is also sending couriers with test kits to other sites.
She said the state has taken a number of steps to help nursing homes find workers during the crisis, boosting MassHealth reimbursements to increase the pay of front-line staffers, and offering hiring bonuses to recruits who work a certain number of hours. While some operators are still struggling to find workers, Sudders said the new jobs portal has already referred hundreds of job candidates to nursing facilities. She said the state is also using an emergency call-up system, MA Responds, to direct volunteers, including doctors and nurses, to long-term care facilities, but it’s not just the state public health officials who’ve failed them, operators say: It’s the federal government. They wonder how much of the virus’s spread could be traced to an early recommendation from the CDC that allowed nursing home employees who were exposed to the virus but did not exhibit symptoms to continue to work as long as they wore masks.
Like the feds wanted to cause a crisis, and how about the buck-passing and self-aggrandizing by that creature?
Romano,, the Essex Group chief executive, said he ignored another CDC recommendation to keep sick and healthy roommates together, rather than separating them, saying it “was just not making common sense.” He estimated that among his eight facilities, there are 25 positive cases and about two deaths.
That seems like a rather low and probably average or below average considering a "normal" year, no?
Is it possible the entire crisis coming from top down is another in a long line of psyops meant to advance certain agendas while fattening certain wallets?
They have lied us into mass-murdering wars on that basis, and this latest crisis is playing out just as the evil cla$$ of rulers drew it up. We have seen pedophilia running rampant up above as well. What wouldn't be beyond them?
A CDC spokeswoman pointed to recently changed agency guidance on nursing homes. The CDC now recommends that a resident with known or suspected COVID-19 be isolated in their own room with their own bathroom, or in a special COVID-19 unit, and cared for by dedicated staff. If the person had a roommate, that person should not be given another roommate for 14 days.
The lack of universal rapid testing has aggravated two daunting challenges nursing homes face — staff and supply shortages — further diminishing their ability to fight the novel coronavirus.
Widespread testing was initially unavailable at nursing homes, whose residents are most at risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19. They were also hobbled by an inability to get results quickly enough to isolate sick residents in a timely way and contain the disease.
Mirroring federal recommendations, guidance from the state Department of Public Health initially called for testing only residents and staff with specific COVID-19 symptoms, such as a cough or fever, but that excluded many who may have been infected but were asymptomatic and potential spreaders of the disease.
That is the rationale they are using to further the contact tracing and tracking aspect as well as setting up the vaccine part of this. You were never sick because you never had it, but these sick control-freak monsters are using it to force the agenda upon us.
It's like the shrink saying you are in denial even if you are not, and when
Some operators said they began pressing their outside labs to test more residents, even when state guidance still called for limited testing. “We did respectfully depart from the guidance we were given at the moment,” said Adam Berman, president of Chelsea Jewish Lifecare, which runs three nursing homes and three assisted living facilities in the Boston area.
Despite such measures, coronavirus outbreaks have brought infections and deaths to Chelsea Jewish facilities and nearly 250 other nursing homes across the state in recent weeks.
As operators clamored for more testing, state health officials expanded the criteria to a wider range of symptoms. Belatedly, they enlisted more technicians and labs, enabling some nursing homes to begin testing everyone, even those who didn’t show symptoms. Under a new program, some nursing homes will begin testing repeatedly at pilot sites this week, but the new “surveillance” testing may be too late and too limited in scope to rein in the fast-moving virus in many facilities.
Expanding the symptoms means the case levels rocket upward, even if those symptoms are from something else!
The slow rollout of testing has also aggravated staffing shortages; anxious workers couldn’t be sure who had the virus, which fed their anxiety and led to waves of departures.
Early testing lapses also worsened shortages of personal protective equipment, the masks, gowns, and gloves caregivers are required to wear in the rooms of patients with confirmed or presumed cases of the virus. Because only some patients could be tested at first, and it could take five to 10 days to get results, all coughing residents were listed as “precautionary,” meaning staff would have to change their protective gear before entering and after leaving their rooms.
“Once you have it, you just burn through PPE," said Tom Lavallee, chief operating officer of Alliance Health & Human Services in Southborough, which runs eight skilled nursing facilities and a rest home in Massachusetts. “If people have symptoms of any kind, you treat them as though they have the virus and put them on precaution while you wait for the tests.”
If the homes had been able to test all residents, not just those who were symptomatic, they could have isolated COVID-positive residents in dedicated units, allowing them to conserve protective equipment, operators said.
When their usual suppliers were unable to fill mounting orders for protective gear, nursing home operators began scrambling to obtain equipment wherever they could find it. Some in Massachusetts joined a consortium called the COVID-19 Policy Alliance, started by a pair of MIT professors, that helped them place bulk orders of equipment from China.
Military-Industrial Tech to the rescue again!
At senior housing sites that have so far kept the virus out, operators continue a daily struggle to protect their residents amid state and federal directives that change constantly, with little time to work through the complexities.
“You can have something that sounds like it makes perfect sense on paper," said Bill Bogdanovich, chief executive of Broad Reach Healthcare, which runs a nursing home and assisted living facility in Chatham, “but at the front lines there are people who have to carry it out and there are people who it impacts, and it’s not as simple as changing a light from red to green.”
Some might call this flying blind. Bogdanovich said it’s worse than that.
“With the different directions from which the guidance is coming, it’s almost [flying] with a cloud swirling around that you can’t even make a decision about which one to go with,” he said.
--more--"
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!
Related:
"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......"
That's who is running the nursing homes and taking care of your beloved old folks.
Do you trust them?
Who remembers granny now, huh?
"How millions of women became the most essential workers in America" by Campbell Robertson and Robert Gebeloff New York Times, April 18, 2020
Every day, Constance Warren stands behind the cold cuts counter at a grocery store in New Orleans, watching the regular customers come and go.
They thank Warren and tell her they do not like being stuck indoors, waiting out the epidemic. She wraps their honey-smoked turkey and smiles.
It is good to have a job right now, the mixed fortune of being deemed an essential worker, but she wonders whether, once everyday life is safe again, people will remember the role she played when it was not.
“Don’t forget that we were open to serve you in your time of need,” she said on a break one recent workday afternoon. “You never know when you might need us again.”
From the cashier to the emergency room nurse to the drugstore pharmacist to the home health aide taking the bus to check on her older client, the soldier on the front lines of the current national emergency is most likely a woman.
Now the New York Times is using the offensive term "e$$ential" worker -- something their genocidal globalist ma$ters came up with and which they willing apply -- and driving further division by using gender.
One in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential, according to a New York Times analysis of census data crossed with the federal government’s essential worker guidelines. Nonwhite women are more likely to be doing essential jobs than anyone else.
Get race into it, too, why not?
The work they do has often been underpaid and undervalued — an unseen labor force that keeps the country running and takes care of those most in need, whether or not there is a pandemic.
There they go stroking you when they took you for granted all these years.
Women make up nearly 9 out of 10 nurses and nursing assistants, most respiratory therapists, a majority of pharmacists, and an overwhelming majority of pharmacy aides and technicians. More than two-thirds of the workers at grocery store checkouts and fast food counters are women.
In normal times, men are a majority of the overall workforce, but this crisis has flipped that. In March, the Department of Homeland Security released a memo identifying “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers,” an advisory guide for state and federal officials. It listed scores of jobs, suggesting they were too vital to be halted even as cities and whole states were on lockdown. A majority of those jobs are held by women.
I don't want to be negative, but why is DHS involved in that?
This whole COVID-19 thing is starting to LOOK LIKE a MILITARY COUP!
Among all male workers, 28 percent have jobs deemed part of this essential workforce. Some of the biggest US employers of men are building trades, like construction and carpentry — lines of work that are now, for the most part, on hold.
Men do make up a majority of workers in a number of essential sectors, including law enforcement, transit and public utilities, and millions face serious and unquestionable risk as they head to work every day, but there are simply not as many of these jobs as there are in the industry at the forefront: health care.
The agenda-pushing globalist behind the pre$$ have wanted to emasculate and neuter men for decades, and here come COVID to help them do that.
There are 19 million health care workers nationwide, nearly three times as many as in agriculture, law enforcement, and the package delivery industry combined.
Long before the outbreak, in an aging and ailing country, the demand for health care was almost limitless. The size of this workforce has ballooned over the decades as medical advances extended the lives of the sick and well alike.
There are now four registered nurses for every police officer, and still hospitals raise alarms about nursing shortages. Within this massive, ever-growing, and now indispensable part of the economy, nearly four out of five workers are women. This is reflected in another grim statistic: While male doctors and nurses have died on the front lines, a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that women account for 73 percent of the US health care workers who have been infected since the outbreak began.
It is kind of an occupational hazard that they knew about long before COVID-19, and they are just doing the jobs they are lucky to have, right?
I mean, the rest of us are non-essential, and I can only wonder how the government and indu$try will fund the needs when the tax base that supported it is gone.
Are we to soon be gone with it?
The nation’s health care industry spreads far beyond hospitals, encompassing a vast army of people who tend to the young, old, sick, and infirm. This “care workforce,” said Mignon Duffy, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who studies women and labor, “is part of the infrastructure of our whole society. It holds everything together,” yet it has long been undervalued, she said, a neglect that is as obvious as ever right now, with acute shortages nationwide of basic safety gear, “but now we’re being forced to identify who the essential workers are,” Duffy said, “and guess who they are?”
But being essential does not at all mean being well compensated or even noticed.
While women have steadily increased their share of high-end health care jobs like surgeons and other physicians, they have also been filling the unseen jobs proliferating on the lowest end of the wage scale, the workers who spend long and little-rewarded days bathing, feeding, and medicating some of the most vulnerable people in the country. Of the 5.8 million people working health care jobs that pay less than $30,000 a year, half are nonwhite and 83 percent are women.
Many are undocumented as well.
Home health and personal care aides, jobs that earn little more than minimum wage and until recently were even exempt from basic labor protections, are two of the fastest growing occupations in the entire US job market. More than 8 in 10 of these aides are women.
“We’re still a part of health care, and we’re not recognized at all,” said Pam Ramsey, 56, who has gone years without health insurance working as a home health aide in rural Pennsylvania.
That is where my print copy put an end to her.
Ramsey did not set out to do this. In her 20s, she earned a degree from a trade school in auto body and mechanics, one of just three women in her graduating class of 115, but her father was badly hurt working in a coal mine, and the duty of taking care of him fell to her rather than her brothers. She has been taking care of people, paid and unpaid, ever since.
If protective equipment is in dangerously short supply at big city hospitals, it is virtually nonexistent in Ramsey’s job. She goes to work with no gear beyond what she can find at the dollar store. She does not have a formal letter, like many others have, identifying her as an essential worker. A policeman recently stopped and questioned her when she was out buying medicine.
“People don’t look at us because we have no license, no certificate, no proof that we’re as good as they are,” Ramsey said, but still she goes to work, bringing whatever rubbing alcohol and peroxide she can get her hands on.
Ramsey is not alone in having to improvise. While some child care centers are still open for the children of essential workers, this is not true everywhere, and although educators nationwide are spending long and demanding days teaching online, a young student at home needs an adult there, too. (The federal classification of educator jobs is unclear, so they were not included in the analysis of the essential workforce; if they had been, the women’s share of the workforce would have been substantially higher.)
As a result, many single mothers who have essential jobs are also facing the added emergency of 24-hour child care.
“This one is helping watch this one’s child while she works the night shift, then she watches hers for the 7-3 shift,” said Keshia Williams, 44, a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in Scranton, Pa., where the staff members — “99.9 percent of them” women — are trying to cover an ever-growing list of rotations left unfilled by infected or quarantined co-workers.
I thought Ivanka fixed all that.
Some N95 masks recently arrived, but she is limited to one a week, an uneasy regimen given that she spends each morning screening residents for the virus. Still, dealing with people face to face is what drew her to her job in the first place. The pandemic has not changed that.
That millions of care workers are “driven by incentives other than purely economic incentives” is in part why this work has traditionally been so undervalued, said Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago.
That is the same univer$ity responsible for neoliberal economics that advocate privatization among other things.
I'm glad they are looking out for the working woman.
It is a type of work that does not produce an object that can be traded or sold, he said; it is simply work that has to be done.
“There is a whole system in place to make us not think of this as critical infrastructure,” he said.
Until that system gets a shock.
(END OPTIONAL TRIM.) “I didn’t sign up for a pandemic,” said Andrea Lindley, 34, an ICU nurse at a Philadelphia hospital where scores of coronavirus patients have been admitted, “but I am not going to walk away when people need me.”
--more--"
Now for the ma$ter race:
"Virus patients at one Israeli hospital are not dying alone" by Isaac Scharf Associated Press, April 18, 2020
JERUSALEM — Elisheva Stern wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her ailing father, who was succumbing to the coronavirus in an Israeli hospital, but knowing countless others around the world are not given the chance to say their last farewells to sick relatives, she decided to enter the virus ward and be by her father’s bedside, even if only for a brief moment, before he died.
Stern’s father, Simha Benshai, 75, died at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center, which offers the next of kin of dying coronavirus patients the rare opportunity to say goodbye in person.
“None of us want to say bye to the people who we love, but I’m actually happy that they gave me the opportunity to say bye to my father,” said Stern. “I was able to see him and to tell him I’m sorry and I love him.’’
The practice is in contrast to many hospitals around the world that don’t allow final family visits as a precaution against spreading the highly contagious virus. That leaves patients to die alone and forces families to grieve from afar.
See?
The rules are different, depending on jew you be.
Recognizing this peculiar tragedy wrought by the virus, Sourasky Medical Center officials opted to spare much-needed protective gear, take careful measures to ward off infection, and offer grieving families a chance to say goodbye.
“The stories of patients dying alone are horrifying,” said Roni Gamzu, the hospital’s chief executive. “This is our moral duty as medical staff and as human beings. No one shall be allowed to die alone.’’
The hospital provides immediate next of kin who want to visit a patient with head-to-toe protective wear — gear in demand around the world and often reserved for health care workers — and allows them about 15 minutes to say goodbye. It then assists them in removing the mask, cap, robe, gloves, and boots with the utmost caution needed to prevent infection.
Elsewhere, family and friends are bidding tortuous goodbyes remotely, often with the help of hospital workers entrusted to speak the families’ final words, or supplying phones as a bridge to communicate with the virus-stricken relative.
The issue has gripped health care workers around the world.
“Families beg to see their loved ones before they die. A seemingly simple request, which in other times would be encouraged, has become an ethical and health care dilemma,” a group of medical residents from the Detroit area wrote this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, calling for creative solutions to address the problem.
The virus has infected over 2 million people worldwide and has killed more than 150,000. It causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms in most patients, who recover within a few weeks, but it is highly contagious and can cause severe illness or death, particularly in older people or those with underlying health problems.
Unlike epicenters like New York or Italy, Israel’s outbreak has so far seen manageable numbers of seriously ill patients. The country has more than 13,000 coronavirus cases and over 160 deaths. Hospitals are not deluged with patients, meaning Sourasky is likely not under as much pressure as other facilities in virus hotbeds and can spare the time and protective gear for the final encounters.
Four families have so far agreed to enter the coronavirus ward in the two weeks since the hospital’s project began.
Dror Maor visited his dying mother-in-law at the hospital recently. Entering the hospital room in full protective gear, he saw Segula Yanai, 81, who was sedated and breathing through a ventilator and flanked by other patients in similar condition. He recited a Jewish prayer and psalms at her bedside.
“Despite the difficult scene, I felt my mother-in-law’s presence and I believe that she felt mine. It was an act of devotion that I am happy to have carried out,’’ he said.
--more--"
I'm sick of the false narrative of the poor, victimized Jew, sorry.
Has coronavirus touched Gaza yet?
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"106 positive cases at Revere nursing home account for city’s surge; Somerville seniors quarantined" by Tonya Alanez Globe Staff, April 19, 2020
The unrelenting scourge of COVID-19 in nursing homes statewide has kept the numbers of positive cases, hospitalized patients, and dead residents on a continual escalation, which did not relent over the weekend.
The 106 positive cases — 85 residents and 21 staff members — at the Lighthouse Nursing Care Center account for the city’s increase. Three of its residents have died.
“It is important to note that more than half of the residents and many of the staff members are asymptomatic,” said Richard Feifer, the care center’s chief medical officer.
Positive test results for a couple of employees triggered the National Guard last week to conduct two rounds of tests that included everyone in the center.....
--more--"
Related:
Sunday’s Boston Globe runs 16 pages of death notices
I noted that yesterday, and the stark reality is grim reminder of the death toll, even if there is no immediate way to determine how many of the deceased were coronavirus victims!!
Also see:
Former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill dies at age 84" by Matt Schudel Washington Post, April 19, 2020
WASHINGTON — Paul O'Neill, a corporate executive who was President George W. Bush’s first treasury secretary, only to become a leading critic of the administration after he was fired from his Cabinet post in 2002, died Saturday at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 84.
The cause was lung cancer, said his son, Paul H. O'Neill Jr.
Mr. O’Neill had been a top budget official in two Republican administrations before becoming a corporate titan, first at International Paper and later as chief executive of Alcoa, the country’s largest aluminum company.
In the 12 years he led Alcoa, Mr. O’Neill turned the business around, increasing sales, improving the safety record of its factories, and making the company a Wall Street darling. With the backing of then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney, his former colleague in the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, Mr. O’Neill was named treasury secretary after Bush’s election in 2000.
In his first year on the job, he helped promote the administration’s 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut, then led efforts to revive the economy after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. but Mr. O’Neill also became known for his outspoken manner and his sometimes sharp dealings with members of Congress and colleagues within the White House. At his first Cabinet meeting in 2001, he reportedly distributed a speech he had delivered two years before about the dangers of global warming, saying it could be as devastating as a nuclear holocaust. It met with a frosty reception from the administration of a president who hailed from the Texas oil fields.
Mr. O’Neill once called the US tax code ‘‘9,500 pages of gibberish’’ and sometimes made other tone-deaf comments.
‘‘One of the great things about where I am now: If people don’t like what I’m doing, I don’t give a damn,’’ he said in 2002 while touring Africa with rock star Bono. ‘‘I could be off sailing around on a yacht or driving around the country. I’m here because I think I can make a difference.’’
Mr. O’Neill once had a testy exchange with powerful Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who questioned whether a multimillionaire business executive could understand the needs of working people.
‘‘I started my life in a house without water or electricity,’’ retorted Mr. O’Neill, who was born in St. Louis and grew up on a series of military bases. ‘‘So, I don’t cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch.’’
Was O’Neill once a Klansman like Byrd?
Of course, Byrd was one of the few that argued against the invasion of Iraq and said it would be a disaster.
When he worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Mr. O’Neill later told journalist Ron Suskind for the 2004 book ‘‘The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill,’’ he believed that most government officials, regardless of political party, ‘‘really think deeply about the ideal of good government and how to get there.’’
He was a traditional Republican who held the No. 2 position at the Office of Management and Budget under Ford, who once told Business Week, ‘‘I can say without reservations that he is the most knowledgeable, objective adviser on the budget I ever had.’’
By the time he was in the Bush Cabinet, Mr. O’Neill found that the climate in the White House had changed. The objectivity he valued seemed secondary to the exercise of political will. When he objected to two additional rounds of tax cuts, which would create huge budget deficits and forestall the reform of the Social Security system, he found himself increasingly marginalized.
Soon after the 2002 midterm elections, which gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, Mr. O’Neill was summoned to a meeting with Cheney. He could scarcely believe his ears, he told Suskind, when Cheney said, ‘‘Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.’’
Cheney asked Mr. O’Neill to resign. ‘‘I’m too old to begin telling lies now,’’ Mr. O’Neill said he told the vice president.
He wrote a terse letter to Bush, then announced his departure to his staff at 8:38 a.m. on Dec. 6, 2002. By 9 a.m., he was in his car, driving back to his home in Pittsburgh.
In January 2004, Mr. O’Neill made more headlines when ‘‘The Price of Loyalty’’ was published. He told Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter, that members of the Bush administration were plotting to drive Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power months before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
‘‘From the very beginning,’’ he told the CBS News program ‘‘60 Minutes’’ in 2004, ‘‘there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.’’
As a member of the National Security Council, Mr. O’Neill told Time magazine, ‘‘I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction’’ — which became the Bush administration’s justification for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
He was a whistleblower!
Moreover, he described Bush as disengaged and incurious — ‘‘like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.’’ White House policy, he said, was driven largely by Cheney’s office.
In the end, Mr. O’Neill was happy to walk away from government, saying, ‘‘I’m an old guy and I’m rich and there’s nothing they can do to hurt me.’’
Paul Henry O'Neill was born Dec. 4, 1935, in St. Louis. His father was an Army sergeant who later held civilian jobs on military bases.
Mr. O’Neill completed high school in Anchorage, where he worked for an engineering company before graduating in 1960 from what is now California State University Fresno. He came to Washington in the 1960s to work as a systems analyst with the Veterans Administration, then in 1966 received a master’s of public administration from Indiana University.
Back in Washington, he moved through the ranks of OMB, where he met Cheney and Alan Greenspan, later the chairman of the Federal Reserve. In 1977, he joined International Paper, eventually becoming chief executive. He moved to Alcoa in 1987, ultimately selling shares of company stock worth an estimated $100 million.
After leaving the Treasury Department, Mr. O’Neill returned to Pittsburgh, where he led initiatives to improve education and health care, and he gave $30 million to Indiana University, which named its school of public and environmental affairs after him.
When ‘‘The Price of Loyalty’’ was published in January 2004, Mr. O’Neill appeared on various television programs. On ‘‘60 Minutes,’’ correspondent Lesley Stahl asked if he was prepared for the backlash that would come from the White House.
‘‘You’re giving me the impression that you’re just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,’’ she said.
‘‘I can’t imagine that I’m going to be attacked for telling the truth,’’ O’Neill said. ‘‘Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?’’
I'm astonished by his naiveté there.
In addition to his son, Paul, of Sewickley, Pa., Mr. O’Neill leaves his wife since 1955, the former Nancy Jo Wolfe of Pittsburgh; three daughters, Patricia Wilcox of Fairfax, Va., Margaret Tatro of Alton Bay, N.H., and Julie O’Neill Kloo of Sewickley; a sister; a brother; 12 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.
--more--"
That was one obituary that caught my eye and for the obvious reason.
Related:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” -- Karl Rove
That was in the book, and it is just a sidebar at a site you should now go see.
