COLLATERALDAMAGE
Experts say deaths due to neglect surging in shadows at care homes
As more than 90,000 of the nation’s long-term care residents have died in the coronavirus pandemic, advocates for the elderly say a tandem wave of fatalities is quietly claiming tens of thousands more succumbing not to the virus but to neglect by overwhelmed staffs and slow declines from isolation.
Nursing home watchdogs are being flooded with reports of residents kept in soiled diapers so long their skin peeled off, left with bedsores that cut to the bone, and allowed to wither away in starvation or thirst.
Beyond that are swelling numbers of less clear-cut deaths that doctors believe have been fueled by despair and desperation from being cut off from loved ones, listed on some death certificates as “failure to thrive.”
“What the pandemic did was uncover what was really going on in these facilities,” said June Linnertz, whose father died in June after she found him in what she said were putrid conditions at his Plymouth, Minn., assisted living facility. “It was bad before, but it got exponentially worse.”
Nursing home expert Stephen Kaye, a professor at the Institute on Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed data from15,000 facilities for the Associated Press, finding that for every two COVID-19 victims in long-term care, another died prematurely of other causes.
Those “excess deaths” beyond the normal rate of fatalities in nursing homes could total more than 40,000 since March.
The more the virus spread through a home, Kaye found, the greater the level of deaths recorded for other reasons. This suggested care suffered as workers were consumed with attending to COVID-19 patients or were left shorthanded as the pandemic infected employees themselves.
“The healthcare system operates kind of on the edge, just on the margin, so that if there’s a crisis, we can’t cope,” Kaye said. “There are not enough people to look after the nursing home residents.”
Dr. David Gifford, chief medical officer of the American Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes, disputed that there has been a widespread inability of staff to care for residents and dismissed estimates of tens of thousands of non-COVID-19 deaths as “speculation.”
“There have been some really sad and disturbing stories that have come out,” Gifford said, “but we’ve not seen that widespread.”
Families around the country, though, say their loved ones didn’t have to die.
In Birmingham, Ala., Donald Wallace was one of the lucky few to avoid infection as COVID-19 tore throughWest Hill Health and Rehab.
But the 75-year-old retired truck driver became so malnourished and dehydrated that he dropped to 98 pounds and looked to his son like he’d been in a concentration camp.
Septic shock suggested an untreated urinary infection, E. coli in his body from his own feces hinted at poor hygiene, and aspiration pneumonia indicatedWallace, who needed help with meals, had likely choked on his food.
“They stopped taking care of him,” said his son, Kevin Amerson, who provided medical files documenting the conditions he described. “They abandoned him.”
West Hill Health saidWallace was “cared for with the utmost compassion, dedication and respect.”
Cheryl Hennen, Minnesota’s long-term care ombudsman, is among the advocates who’ve seen complaints pour in for bedsores, dehydration, and other examples of neglect, such as a man who choked to death while unsupervised during mealtime. She fears many more stories will emerge as her staff and families return to homes.