Researchers from the University of Notre Dame in America have analysed the deaths data from U.S. nursing homes and come to a disturbing, if not unexpected conclusion. While ‘higher quality’ nursing homes generally had lower Covid deaths, they had higher overall deaths, and this appears to be because the brutal Covid isolation protocols they followed to reduce transmission proved deadly in their own right. Furthermore, while the difference between the Covid death rates in higher and lower quality nursing homes diminished after the first wave, the difference in total overall deaths continued to increase, suggesting, tragically, that the brutal protocols were continued long after they ceased offering any benefit at all.
The background to this tragedy is that on March 13th 2020, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) recommended that nursing homes restrict “visitors and non-essential personnel” from entering the home and cancel “in-person dining and other group activities”. These policies, the researchers write, came at a considerable cost in human wellbeing: “An abundance of qualitative evidence from nursing home staff, administrators, and resident family members suggests that the lack of in-person contact with loved ones and other residents not only generated feelings of loneliness, isolation, and despair, but may have also expedited death.”
They continue:
Existing research shows that social isolation increases both dementia severity and the likelihood of adverse outcomes among those with Alzheimer’s and mortality among the elderly. According to CDC provisional data, there were 56,464 excess deaths (i.e., realised deaths above that which is predicted using historical averages) among Alzheimer’s patients through early October of 2021; however, only 22,709 or 40% had a corresponding positive COVID-19 diagnosis, leaving 60% of these excess deaths not directly related to the disease but to other aspects of the pandemic.
The researchers found that, as of September 13th 2020, five-star homes had experienced 11.4% more non-Covid deaths than one-star homes, all else equal; by April 15th 2021, this figure had grown to nearly 15%. (Note these figures are based on modelling that controls or adjusts for confounding factors, not just raw data.) The additional deaths likely result from isolation and loneliness, the authors argue, citing research from Connecticut nursing homes which documented “substantial weight loss and increases in severe pressure ulcers among residents who did not contract COVID-19″. The same study also found that only 5% of respondents had visitors three or more times per week, compared to 56% before the pandemic, and just 13% reported dining in a communal setting, compared to 69% before the pandemic. An additional factor, the authors note, may be a reduction in interactions with healthcare providers, both inside and outside the home.
The authors observe with dismay that even by the end of June 2021, visits to nursing homes were still down by 35% compared to January 2020 levels, likely contributing to the continued additional mortality.
They conclude that more balanced policies are required that aren’t so obsessed with one risk factor that they lose sight of harms done in the process.
Our results suggest that more balanced policies and guidelines that emphasise maximizing the health of residents, rather than just minimising risk to one disease, may have improved outcomes. For a period of time, CMS and the news media at large measured nursing home COVID-19 performance using cases and deaths only, meaning the logical response on the part of the nursing home was to minimise these counts regardless of the cost. In retrospect, the tone of the discussion and the measurement of outcomes may have led to some deadly consequences. As economists continually stresses, there are benefits and costs to all regulations.
The inhumanity that has characterised the monomania with which authorities and much of the public have chased after minimising Covid infections and deaths at the expense of everything that makes life worth living – and doing so for an indefinite period of time – is perhaps the worst aspect of the pandemic. None, perhaps, have suffered under this blinkered approach more than the very vulnerable people in care homes, for many of whom it actually cost them their lives. I’d like to think we can learn from this and pledge it will never happen again, but the way many leaders are currently behaving over vaccine passports leaves me with little hope that such lessons can be learned, and the inhumanity will continue and keep appearing in new guises.
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I had a discussion with a senior member of staff at our local nursing home, during 2020, when he proudly told me that no-one had “caught Covid”. I asked him how many people were deemed as having capacity – around 25%, he said – and when I asked him if he thought they should make their own decisions about receiving visitors he looked a bit surprised and said he’d never thought about it.
‘Brutal’ is the word. Cold-hearted, vindictive, sadistic cruelty. The perpetrators deserve to die in the same misery and loneliness that they inflicted on their helpless victims. Hell hath no fire hot enough.
100%.
Dante is actually quite sparing with the use of fire; the lowest circle with Judas, Cassius and Brutus (if I remember correctly) is ice-cold.
Dante doesn’t have a monopoly on Hadean climatology.
i agree completely . this to me is the worst , unbelievably cruel to inflict on the elderly. to me even more so than to the children the perpetrators must be made to pay for this abomination
Well said Annie- absolutely agree with you.
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“They conclude that more balanced policies are required that aren’t so obsessed with one risk factor that they lose sight of harms done in the process.”
But that’s not how bureaucrats think, is it?
My mother spent her final years in a very good assisted living home near my sister’s family in Los Angeles. As her mental faculties declined, she fell past the point at which she would normally have been removed from the “general population” and put into “memory care,” a form of isolation behind locked doors. We prevailed upon the home management to keep her among the residents she knew and especially her caregivers, who became more of a family to her than her real family (she didn’t recognize me, the last few times I saw her). They were kind enough to accommodate us, since my mother, unlike so many of the dementia victims in the facility, was rarely belligerent or difficult. She didn’t need to go into “memory care.”
This went on until a state inspector came around and noticed my mother, far gone with Alzheimer’s, was not living in “memory care.” The facility had no choice but to separate her from the rest of the residents (and her regular caregivers) and within a month she was dead.
Now I can’t say for sure it was the change that killed her and in any case her death was something of blessing, but this is to me an example of how officious government busybodies, working strictly according to the rules, often cause far more harm than good.
Most care homes in the UK are privately owned where profit margins are paramount. Cost cutting exercises in protective equipment was one of the reasons so many died in care homes. The same happened in Sweden which has more privately run care homes than neighbouring countries.
I know of one very expensive care home where they didn’t invest in enough PPE and the local GP Surgery had to give them theirs.
The profit incentive is not conducive to good elderly care.
I suppose it’s a good idea that the dire results of lockdowns and rules are analysed and reported.
However I am bemused by the “eureka” tone that permeates these findings. If I take a loaded pistol, put it to someone’s head, and pull the trigger, it’s about 99% certain I’ll kill that person. No difference here.
Will Jones continues to highlight the real effects of these draconian mandates and protocols. Good for Notre Dame for commissioning this important study. Leaving lonely and vulnerable nursing home residents in rooms where they see no friends or loved ones for months (years) is cruelty of the worst form. I’d also point out all of the people who died alone in hospitals where no loved ones could visit. I’m sure many of these people might have lived – or lived longer – if a loved one was checking on them every day.
One of my best friends from high school lost his father, who was alone in a hospital for months in 2020. My friend’s late father never saw anyone besides hospital staffers for (I think) four months before finally dying alone. This is the type “compassion” our public health officials and leaders have given us on a massive scale.
… And then when tens of thousands of these former nursing home and long-term hospital patients died, friends and family members were told they couldn’t attend their funerals. All of this in America, the so-called “land of the free.”
I often reflect how glad I am my parents passed before this idiotic pandemic. Isolating old people is the worst thing you can do to them. And for what? To protect them from a death that is an any case inevitable and relatively imminent?
I feel the same. My dad literally lived for our visits. Without them he’d have simply given up and died, as these poor people clearly did.
So very convenient for the Fascist government fiends, too. Looking after old people costs money, which they needed for important things like furlough, and track and trace, and useless PPE, and lining their own pockets.
I was asked by a friend to talk to one of her friends (actually I was at school with both) about the friend’s friend’s mother, who had been admitted to hospital with acute anaemia but in 9 days had deteriorated dramatically – could barely speak, had stopped eating and had fallen over twice. I explained to her that the hospital couldn’t stop her being discharged and she managed to get her mother out of there and into a private hospital, as she needed care to recover to her former health (aged 92, and whilst in the NHS hospital had contracted both covid – recovered well, and C-diff – rather more difficult to get over).
In the private hospital, she had her own consultant, a Chinese doctor, who emphasised the importance of her mother having familiar people around her, to aid in her recovery. So she, her brother and a carer took it in turns to stay overnight with her mother. Compare that to the no visitors at all policy of the NHS.
I am thankful it was even an option. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been in some countries and American states.
The great bulwark against abuse of old people in ‘care’ (care?) homes is the vigilance of visiting relatives. That removed, every kind of cruelty, up to and including murder, can flourish. Old, senile people are very difficult to look after, and – let’s face it – can be unlovable even to their nearest and dearest, let alone a poorly trained, underpaid, immigrant ‘care’ worker. During the foul lockdowns, every cruelty could be, and was, practised with complete impunity.
To understand why this was possible, look at pictures of Wankok in his glory. Is that a man (‘man’?) who would shrink from cruelty to those weaker than himself?
Anyone who has visited a loved one in the hospital can identify 10 times when they had to chew somebody’s butt out to get appropriate care for their loved one. Or when things that were supposed to be done were not being done. So it takes no imagination to picture all of the neglect and abuse that happened when these extra set of eyes and voices were not present.
That’s – this will probably come accross as very cynic – just the usual, compassionate and caring selflessness of Corona’s witnesses: We are all at risk from COVID. This includes Corona’s witnesses as they’re a proper subset of all. But nobody is endangered by someone who dies from dementia while being held in solitary confinement in a care home. Hence, the moral demands are clear! For the many and not for the few! So, to hell with people in care homes!
That Corona’s witnesses are a proper subset of all is certainly just coincidence here and should in no way be taken as an indication that they mainly meant to save themselves at the expense of whoever needed to be sacrificed for them to esacpe from a mostly hypothetical danger.
This is sad. I worked as a domiciliary carer in west London during the first lockdown, visiting mainly older people. Some had not left their homes for a year, and were going doolaley owing to isolation and dementia symptoms. Few had any friends or family. I also caught covid from a man I had to wash and shave. It seems though that those with their own flats, or rooms in sheltered accommodation, may have done slightly better than out-and-out care home residents.
I refused to take a vaccine in Feb 2021 when offered a care home job. The shrieks of the in-patients which could be heard outside the building did not help convince me it would be a fun experience or terribly beneficial to my mental health.
Okay, now how about a study of the UK’s use of Midazolam and Morphine on so-called hospital bed-blockers, kicked out and into ‘care’ homes during the “first wave”? Why won’t DS talk about this?
“But loneliness is not contagious!”, the Branch Covidians will surely cry. Be that as it may, as this study shows it is still at least as deadly as Covid, if not deadlier. And the zealots who pushed such policies, and continued pushing them long after these policies outlived their meager usefulness, have a LOT of blood on their hands!
Would anyone care to explain what a ‘covid death’ is because it seems to cover anyone who simply coughed before dying, those testing false positive with no symptoms, people killed by the injections and anyone with flu and pneumonia.
Many instances in the UK of care home residents starving themselves to death. UK politicians are literally getting away with murder. In fact, considering the number of deaths to date and in the future from injections and lockdowns, they are getting away with committing genocide.
despicable ! the cruelty !
I don’t think the article gives the link, so here it is:
https://europepmc.org/article/med/35104669
I see it does now.
No one in Government interested.
“None, perhaps, have suffered under this blinkered approach more than the very vulnerable people in care homes, for many of whom it actually cost them their lives.”
One of them was my dad.
am so sorry this is so terrible
If the quarantining effort had been aimed at protecting care home residents rather than locking down almost everyone else, that might have been wise. This article, however, reminds us that even then a ham-handed policy would have done more harm than good. But can it ever make sense to expect a competent, light-touch, responsive policy from arms of government? I think not.
One of the most heartbreaking stories of this covid narrative.
Solitary Confinement for extended periods is classed as “cruel and unusual punishment.” Basically, they tortured Care Home Residents to death….. and it’s unforgiveable.