Fighting for vulnerable, while fighting COVID-19
Had things taken a slightly different turn, Kathy Flaherty intended to be an immunologist. Instead she chose law, and not long after the attorney started to show symptoms of the virus that’s been holding us hostage, she took a free course on COVID-19 and epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University.
She signed up partly to refresh her memory of her college biochemistry classes, but mostly, she enrolled because, as executive director of Connecticut Legal Rights Project, she works with some of the state’s most vulnerable residents – low-income people with mental health conditions -- and she wanted to be better prepared.
What she hadn’t prepared for was her own four-month bout with COVID-19 symptoms while her organization fights in court for state residents who are patients in psychiatric hospitals where social distancing is all but impossible.
Recently, Flaherty’s organization filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the state that seeks to secure better conditions and the release of vulnerable patients from Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH) and Whiting Forensic Hospital during the pandemic. At one point, according to the suit, CVH closed an entire ward because nearly every patient was showing symptoms. Some were transferred to Middlesex Health.
The state has sought to get the suit dismissed, which is odd, because when nursing homes accounted for roughly 60% of the virus deaths in the state, Gov. Ned Lamont ordered a third-party review of their and assisted living facilities’ response to the pandemic.
“What’s happening in nursing homes happens in every kind of congregate living environment,” said Flaherty. “If you have a bunch of people living together, those people are at a higher risk of transmitting the virus.”
The five plaintiffs in the case include a 67-year old Vietnam veteran whose shown symptoms o fthe virus, and a 64-year old woman in kidney failure who remains at CVH because she hasn’t been able to arrange for dialysis in her home community. Another defendant has emphysema and Stage IV prostate cancer.
Flaherty is watching over this case while working part-time from home, sometimes prone on her bed racked by a series of symptoms that have sometimes confounded her. On the way home from a late day at work on March 11, Flaherty stopped off at a CVS to buy a thermometer. She gassed up her car, bought some snacks, and went to bed with a scratchy throat. The next day, she awoke feeling worse, and though she normally would have pushed through and gone into the office, Flaherty had read enough about the virus to stay home.
Her symptoms have fluctuated. On some days, she says she’s felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. As much as she could, she did her own contract tracing and discovered a friend with whom she’d early had coffee was sick as well. That friend was eventually hospitalized, Flaherty said. Within a week, Flaherty thought she would join her friend – or worse. At her lowest point, she began to organize and label files she brought home from her office to make things easier for her husband and her colleagues if she didn’t pull through.
Since that March day, Flaherty said she hasn’t had a single day without symptoms – fevers, sore throat, lung-rattling cough, extreme exhaustion. She has survived, she said, with the help of her husband (whose battle with the virus wasn’t as fraught as hers) and friends who dropped off groceries on her porch. When she’s had the energy, she’s been able to work from home and maintain a safe distance from others, and that the plaintiffs in the suit don’t have that privilege galls her. For this highrisk population, every day without a hearing means that much more exposure.
“The fact that I sleep at all is kind of a miracle,” said Flaherty. “It gets to the point where thinking of our clients, and the people who really shouldn’t have been locked up any more anyway, I’m so exhausted, I do eventually fall asleep.”
One solution is something housing specialists have talked about for years – more affordable housing with support services. Providing housing with necessary services is still less expensive than housing them in a psychiatric hospital – and that’s strictly taking into account finances.
Never mind the emotional cost of keeping people locked away.
“The state spends a lot of money locking people up at Whiting who do not need to be there,” said Flaherty. “We are losing out on some tremendously creative and smart people not being able to contribute to society. Instead, they are locked up there, being exposed.”
contribute to society. Instead, they are locked up there, being exposed.”