Lack of information serves nobody

With a few clicks of a computer mouse, anyone can get to the Niagara Region public health department website.

Results from routine health and safety inspections carried out at all private and publicly operated nursing homes are there, in fine detail.

Were utensils stored properly in the kitchen? Were food storage racks and pallets kept clean? How about the mechanical dishwasher, was it constructed to meet health department standards? And were violations brought into compliance?

That’s good information. It’s important to know what goes on inside the places where our parents and grandparents live. So why does public health invoke the cone of near-silence when one of those homes is in COVID-19 outbreak?

Look up Lundy Manor in Niagara Falls, for example, and the Region website informs you it has been in COVID-19 outbreak since March 30. That’s it. No more. Nothing to indicate the terrible toll the coronavirus has taken on people there, the people it sickened and the efforts staff have made to care for them while risking their own health.

It doesn’t tell you that all residents and staff at Lundy Manor have been tested for the coronavirus, and that 41 residents and eight staff showed positive results. It doesn’t tell you 12 have returned from hospital, while seven remain. Or that 15 residents from Lundy Manor have died from COVID-19.

If you had a family member living there, or one who was thinking of moving in, wouldn’t you like to be told that? Wouldn’t you deserve to be informed?

This isn’t to single out Lundy Manor, because several other homes across Niagara — Garden City Manor in St. Catharines, Albright Manor in Beamsville, and Seasons Retirement Community and Royal Rose Place both in Welland — are in COVID-19 outbreak as well.

As Premier Doug Ford notes, conditions inside most nursing homes mean COVID-19 rips through them like fire on dry grass when it gets inside.

On another part of its website, public health reports 33 per cent of all COVID-19 cases in Niagara are residents of long-term care facilities, while 20.3 per cent are health-care workers. Many of those workers are employed by the care facilities.

Those facilities are the epicentre of the outbreak in Niagara, as they are in many other places.

There were long-standing issues at Ontario’s homes before the coronavirus arrived, including low pay for staff who are asked to do more work with less support because government funding isn’t adequate.

When this is all over, one of the first acts has to involve addressing the way we care for our seniors when they can’t live at home.

It’s necessary for the public to be aware of the impact an outbreak like COVID-19 can have on these places when those problems are finally addressed. Right now, public health isn’t releasing the detailed numbers. To read its website, an outbreak at one site is like another.

Many of these homes are privately owned and their managers have no incentive to disclose what is happening. To their credit, several in Niagara have been open when contacted by reporters from this paper. But others haven’t, and if not for our efforts the detailed numbers might not be known to the public.

Our parents and grandparents are basically trapped inside long-term care and nursing homes. Many have gone weeks without being visited by friends or families.

Sure, the curve is flattening. But we’re worried still. We look to the authorities to get us through this. But when what we get back is little more than silence, it shakes our confidence.