CT Sending COVID-Positive Patients Into Nursing Homes – Opinion

The COVID pandemic started on March 25, 2020. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order requiring nursing homes to take COVID-positive residents. This was despite it being known — even at that point — that seniors were the most vulnerable population. In New York, many people died after receiving this order. Cuomo attempted to conceal this, changing how deaths were counted. I wrote about it in May 2020. The way New York counted deaths suddenly changed after the numbers became public. They started not counting the deaths as nursing home deaths if the people died in the hospital — as likely most might after they got sick in the nursing home. To blunt Cuomo’s criticism regarding his March order, they could distort the figures.

New York wasn’t the only state that issued such an order — Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania did it as well. All States with Democratic governors.

Florida on the other hand — governed by Republican Ron DeSantis — operated from sense. DeSantis banned Democratic governors from putting their seniors at greatest risk.

Since the beginning of the pandemic the state has made sure that nurses cannot allow residents from nursing homes to return home if they are positive for the disease. Some people were still showing signs of COVID-19 symptoms days, weeks or even hours after their recovery. The state opened transitional nursing homes to care for stable coronavirus patients.

You would think that states across the country would learn from their mistakes that have cost lives of thousands. But now, there’s Connecticut, which appears to be unaware of the thousands of dead who died just next door in New York. It was first reported that the Connecticut Department of Public Health ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients despite the fact that COVID numbers are increasing in these facilities.

Before they were allowed to enter a nursing home, they had to pass negative tests. This is not necessary anymore.

Nursing homes will have to accept COVID-positive admissions from hospitals, according to a new requirement from the Connecticut Department of Public Health https://t.co/czoBnjcXMe

— Hartford Courant (@hartfordcourant) January 6, 2022

But when that got a lot of understandable backlash; now, we’re being told that they are not “forcing,” just “asking.”

Correction: Lamont is not forcing COVID-positive people to be admitted into nursing homes. They are asking them to https://t.co/5rFPynY4yx

— Hartford Courant (@hartfordcourant) January 7, 2022

But ordering or asking, it’s putting the nursing home at risk and would seem to require the nursing homes to take affirmative action to reject the admission. It is absurd to allow someone still positive into a nursing home. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. You don’t have to use the COVID money from various state legislative bills. You wouldn’t want to leave those who are at greatest risk of being in danger in nursing homes. Yes, Connecticut’s governor is…wait for it…a Democrat, Ned Lamont. That, I believe, answers my question.