What is being done to prevent long-term care home deaths?

I do not have a friend or relative in a long-term care home in B.C., but like the families of those who have died in 2020, I am getting tired of the provincial updates continuing to offer condolences but little in terms of information as to why the deaths continue unabated and what is being done to try to stop them.

Seniors in long-term care accounted for 70 per cent of the 901 deaths recorded in B.C. last year.

The focus on actively improving the safety of long-term care home residents does not seem to have materialized.

Arbitrary decisions of shutdowns of restaurants at short notice or forbidding extended families from seeing each other seem to dominate the attention of the health minister and provincial health officer.

Forbidding family members from visiting their loved ones does not seem to have stopped the deaths and the restriction definitely has made life less worth living for the long-term care residents.

Calls from the homes and the provincial seniors' advocate for same-day daily testing for all staff going into these homes has been continually ignored. The quick test may not be as accurate as the other tests, but surely it is better than nothing.

Focusing on the care actually received in the long-term care homes and ways to improve the level of staffing in terms of numbers and training — this will probably mean ending the accepted practise of making a profit out of the care of the vulnerable elderly — would seem to me to be a far more likely way to address the deaths from COVID-19.

Do we as a society really care about the elderly? Maybe we could take a leaf out of the book of the COVID-19 hero, Milan Kljajic, in Richmond's Kiwanis Towers, where there has not been one case of COVID of 400 residents (oldest 97, average age 76), in great part due to his efforts and “extraordinary care and love,” according to a grateful resident.

Mary Phillips, Richmond