As a frequent listener to Code WACK!, I am well aware that you are an advocate for changes in US healthcare policies, especially for Medicare for All, and that your podcasts necessarily reflect that mission. But your two-part series on a proposal to legislate what appears to be the MAHA position on nursing home visits during pandemics omits a very important voice: the families, including my own, of people who FIRST required nursing home care during the pre-vaccine Covid era (roughly Jan. 2020 to April 2021, about 15 months).
Because of staffing shortages, it was VERY difficult for a new patient to be accepted into a nursing home during this time. During the pre-vaccine pandemic, our family’s only option (after unsuccessfully attempting home care for my father, who had suffered a broken neck in a fall) was at the nursing home which had the highest Covid death rate in the region. Those 34 deaths represented 32% mortality among the infected. The pre-vaccine mortality rate for people of my own age and co-morbidity factors was 15%. Those are Russian Roulette odds, and I would never play that game! Our family did NOT find window visits onerous, and were in fact pleased that the facility had adopted such strict protocols to protect their residents and our Dad, who never contracted Covid. In our state (Ohio), nursing homes had high priority when the Covid vaccines became available in 2021, and we resumed in-person visits after we all became vaccinated. Your coverage should have included at least lip service to the families who were singularly dedicated to the preservation of their loved ones’ LIVES, and less so to the fulfillment of other residents' WANTS.
Before my retirement, I was involved with research into vaccine production, so I have attended my share of lectures by epidemiologists. The legislation you advocate, the Essential Caregivers Act, flies in the face of epidemiological science and mathematics, so I have no intention of asking my Congressional Representative to endorse it. No ideology can constrain a virus to obey the 14-day maximum period allowed by the Act for nursing home visitation restrictions.
I am surprised that any serious public advocacy group would show such deliberate disregard for science, also known as “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Here in Ohio, we are already bombarded with despicable TV ads castigating the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Dr. Amy Acton, who was head of the Ohio Department of Health under Republican Governor Mike DeWine during the pandemic. Those two individuals did more than anyone else to protect 11 million Ohioans from the too-often fatal ravages of Covid.
