Funeral for the Old: Let Us Rethink "The Nursing Home"

As of March 30, 2020, more than 400 of 15,000 US nursing facilities had an outbreak of coronavirus—among residents, staff or both— according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

There are indications, however, that those reports dramatically understate the situation. Minnesota, one of the few states publicly disclosing outbreaks in care facilities, reported 42 facilities with COVID-19 on April 4. This despite a relatively low infection rate among its overall population.

Minnesota Department of Health April 7 2020

Along with our failure/refusal to test The Old in February-- who reside in nursing homes,veterans' homes, and psychiatric hospitals---we are now seeing completely inaccurate COVID-19 death tolls in each city of our country. These death tolls refer only to those persons who live outside of a nursing home, a prison, a veteran's home, or a mental hospital. In San Diego, for example, the death count is very low, but the city is the possessor of a huge quantity of nursing homes. Why are the numbers of their dead not listed among the number of the city's dead?

Enormous numbers of the old in U.S. nursing homes have been infected; and the dead are often left in their beds, since these institutions lack morgues. Some homes have moved the dead into other rooms, but these homes have become extremely dangerous for the inhabitants, who lay three feet from the dead. And of course this situation is fatal to essential workers.

The numbers of the dead in nursing homes are not reflected in the city dead of COVID-19.

In Riverside, California, eighty residents of one nursing home were evacuated because no nurses  or health workers showed up for work. Has this nursing home been able fo reach the sons and daughters of those evacuated? If separated into fifteen homes, how have their children found them? Have they found them?

The Old in nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, and in prisons, exist in colonies inside the city, colonies for in-valids, who, in reality, are perceived as existing outside of the city-- as if living on an island of lepers, like Molokai, the island off mainland Hawaii; Spinalonga, the island off of Greece; or Carville, Louisiana, our famous leper colony. The lepers who were sent to these places were often arrested and sent by force by the priest or mayor of the town. The mother or father were left waving goodbye to the son or daughter, never to see them again.

This is the picture today that exists of nursing home victims. And this picture has existed for decades. The coronavirus has amplified the cruelty of this imprisonment, but it also can give us a chance to look more closely at an institutionalization which has failed those so loved. Why do families send those, who have finally deserved their retirement-- their place in the sun-- after decades of hard work--to facilities of death, to camps where they lay or sit silent, waiting only for a monthly visit, oblivion, and death?

The social security check, which can be requested by a person of 62 years (and the federal government is try to raise the age of qualification) is a very small sum of money that will marginally pay for housing. It cannot cover food, household supplies, transportation, or a meager supply of cards or gifts at Christmas for loved ones. It cannot pay for a little Xmas tree. It cannot cover a trip to the hairdresser. It cannot cover the large amounts of copays to the various doctors the old must see. It cannot pay for "a life" worth living. It can only pay for a prisoner of a small apartment to live without more than canned food and toilet paper. It cannot pay for a caregiver.

Why have the old paid taxes for fifty years, after working as teachers, waitresses, factory workers, scientists, and nurses--only to be shipwrecked upon old age? Why does our government not provide real funds to them? They, less than anyone, are not reimbursed because they are no longer considered part of the firmament, of the main.

They live in a no-man's land, reminiscing upon their former lives as useful members of society --now, without a present or a future.

With the coronavirus, those who are not visited at a window of their nursing facility, are not visited at all. They are left to die alone in daily dread of the virus, in terror of the virus, infected by the virus, and dying with the virus as their only company.

Of course, those living in nursing homes are sent there because there is no civilized place where they may continue to enjoy their lives--with the assistance
they deserve. But a broken hip is not a broken mind. A spinal injury is not illiterate.

Some of our finest minds are sent to nursing homes, where they completely deteriorate, developing heart disease because they are not encouraged to exercise, dementia because they receive no visitors or tiny amounts of care with love from an overworked staff.

Why is Life Sentence by Nursing Home a death sentence?

The giant number of infections that the old get in these places includes MRSA, Cloistrum Difficile, SARS, and many other diseases that, with single or repeated attacks, cause death. The level of cleanliness in these institutions vary, but it is generally poor. These diseases thrive on the unsanitary conditions therein. If one reads about the Chinese wet markets, characterized by animals running though feces,urine and innards, some of whom have been exposed to the Coronavirus by bats in a zoonotic transfer of the disease, one thinks of the nursing home.

Let us speak of animals; most humans revere animals over each other. Enough to eat them. Which is what happens when humans eat exotic animals, when they put too many pigs, for example, in filthy yards before slaughter, and take over areas populated by indigenous animals, forcing them into a foreign population of other animals, with whom no contact should be made. Pets for all occasions, exotic animals, zoos, cross-contamination from animal to human to animal to human. Humans love animals.

In nursing homes, in which sheets smeared with feces are often not changed for days, in which the wrong vein--of an arm without lymph nodes-- is used to obtain a blood sample; in which unsterilized medical instruments are passed from patient to patient, in which catheters are brutally applied and not removed until the patient is screaming, in which infections are allowed to go untreated, including bedsores; infected sores on hands, feet, legs, and arms are rife and caused from dehydration; in which the patients are not treated for severe constipation brought on by poor diet, the overprescription of antipsychotics (patient-management drugs), anticonvulsants and virtually no exercise-- using digital manipulation to remove dry feces--which is inhumanely painful--and which creates anal sores and continuous bleeding, in which patients hide in toilets in order to apply carefully-hoarded tweezers or spoons to extricate this fecal matter from their anal area; in which peritonitis is so common because the hard stool rips through the intestinal wall and poisons the body; in which hope is gone because of the abrupt treatment by overworked nurses and other essential workers, each of whom may have a 20 patient load--patients are treated like the animals we most detest. (The essential workers must do three jobs to provide for their families, because they are paid below minimum wage and also treated like animals, continuing the cycle of contamination from nursing home to family to nursing home.) COVID-19 must be remembered as the Essential Worker Pandemic. The nursing home is the ideal breeding ground for the Coronavirus and those breeded-upon have been ignored completely.

The nursing home is a prison for The Old.

Both nursing home and prison facilities share unsafe proximity of their inhabitants. Both are denied facemasks, gloves, any,or insubstantial soap, hand sanitizers, products to keep their bedsides clean, clean sheets, clean nightclothes, socks, foot coverings, underwear, and a reasonable response time to urgent calls from the staff. Again,any staff that has to work without PPE is a staff of those who know they are going to die, or are not told that they are going to die. And neither the patients or the staff have access to Coronavirus testing;

Both nursing homes and prisons, to a large degree, are privately-owned facilities, which lose money if any one of the population is sick or dies. Better not to contact anyone, and keep making money off of their bodies.

In the worst cases, send to public hospitals,so that public taxation pays the bill.

In the USA and much of Western society, The Old are seen as in-valid; they are seen as having outlived their usefulness to society and are immediately treated upon registration--like living corpses.

There is no encouragement to exercise, and this means hearts and lungs that work poorly and cannot fight pneumonia, the most common form of death among the old, let alone COVID-9.

In Italy, the tragedy of the massive death toll of the old is, in great part, the loss of the familial body or center--the hearth, the embrace, the conscience, the forgiveness, the hope, the dream, the unconditional love, and the legacy.

This dream is held in the hand of the grandmother or grandfather. The greetings of the Italians are composed of kissing,touching, embracing,and exclamations. The cooking with the family standing together and laughing, is the constant closeness which is the open vowel of a culture so adept at singing because the language is the sonority of the embrace. You can hear the Italian voice over the houses closes to each other. This culture will be altered forever as a result of this virus: now the grandmother is taken away by essential workers, to a fortress of the dying, to suffer alone until death.

Return to the USA and what do we see? Again, the hearth of the family is placed far away from the family, as in-valid, as the useless appendage of a family indentured by the industrial revolution, in which every man fights for himself to exact a fortune in the new world.

We have a cognitively impaired, mentally ill, and malignantly narcissistic president who is responsible for the death of tens of thousands of Americans, not the least of which are confined throughout this country.

Sociopaths feel nothing for others, but this president is not even capable of pretending to care for any of the sick. It is certain that his feelings about the old are terrifying.

He has committed the murder of thousands in the USA, by refusing to alert the population to the danger of the virus for three weeks, and by refusing to listen to his own researchers in January, who advised him to stock his shelves with tests and medical equipment appropriate to a respiratory pandemic--ventilators, PPE, He has refused to have a fluid and transparent non-partisan engagement with the governors of each state. He has threatened to fire Dr. Fauci, and has terminated funding to The World Health Organization, in a moment of infantile rage, risking the pause of care and research needed globally.

The continuous, premeditating murder of our population must be placed at the feet of this president legally.

In the meantime, there is a lot of rethink available to many of us. We must appeal to our federal and state and city governments to fairly subsidize our oldest workers. We must imagine ourselves in their places, if that's what it takes. We must rethink how we treat those who hold our love and our legacies to their breasts and sigh, "Remember what it was like when I was alive?"