A discussion relating to Corona and our nursing home system:

On a multicountry trip to South America, President Ronald Reagan couldn’t restrain himself from the inane observation that every tourist finds himself making about such trips. “Every country is different.” So, it seems, is every virus capable of spreading into a pandemic.
The great influenza of 1918-19, for example, tended to kill otherwise healthy people in the prime of life, ages 20 to 40. The COVID-19 virus tends to kill people age 70 and above, especially those with comorbidities.
Yet, even though that was apparent early on, America’s governors have done a poor job of protecting those most at risk — residents of nursing homes, elderly people with physical frailties and, often, cognitive impairment.
The result: One-third of reported coronavirus deaths in the United States, according to the New York Times's reporting, are of nursing home residents or workers. And nursing homes accounted for a majority of deaths in heavily hit states, such as New Jersey (52%), Massachusetts (59%), Pennsylvania (66%), and Connecticut (55%), and for 80% of deaths in otherwise lightly hit Minnesota.
That percentage is much lower (20%) in America’s COVID-19 epicenter, New York, but the Empire State still leads the nation with 5,403 nursing home deaths — about 1 out of every 14 COVID-19 deaths in the entire country.
Why so many? On March 25, the state health commissioner ordered nursing homes to accept patients with the virus. It’s unclear why he made this fatal decision. Maybe he wanted to keep hospital beds available. Or maybe he feared that sick people would be dumped onto the street.
When asked about this policy in late April, Gov. Andrew Cuomo professed ignorance. Two weeks later, on Saturday, after 46 days in effect, he reversed it.
New York wasn’t the only state that insisted on placing infected patients in nursing homes. New Jersey’s policy was similar, explicitly barring homes from requiring testing before admitting patients. California had the same policy but dropped it after 10 days.
Other states, recognizing the dangers of infecting the vulnerable, required or encouraged nursing homes to set up separate units or staffs to handle patients testing positive. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely criticized in the national media for avoiding a total lockdown, zeroed in on nursing homes, encouraging repeated testing and temperature-taking of residents and staff and isolating anyone testing positive. Florida, a state with 2 million more people than New York, had just 714 nursing home deaths, 13% of the number in New York.
As terrible as these nursing home policies have been, we ought to hesitate a moment before piling on. Remember that in March, epidemiologists and governors were worried that hospital facilities would be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients in need of ventilators, which had been previously used to treat patients with severe respiratory function reduced by other viruses. The rationale was surely to get recovering patients out of those supposedly needed hospital beds.
The nursing home mandates of the Cuomo administration and others were obviously mistakes, with fatal consequences. So was the failure of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to produce virus tests, and so was President Trump’s failure to cut off air traffic from Europe in January at the same time he did so from China. And so, perhaps, will continued lockdowns be for many places, given the negative public health effects of economic collapse.
Government officials’ decisions about a novel virus will often turn out to be mistaken and cost lives. But decisions to send viral patients into nursing homes probably comes closest to justifying screams of “Blood on your hands!”
Fortunately, societies can learn from mistakes. We have learned that this virus is not easily spread in open spaces as originally feared. We have learned that the risk of fatalities among children and adolescents is near zero, perhaps less than that of the seasonal flu.
We have learned that our hospitals aren’t going to be overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients and that ventilators don’t help much. We have learned that it’s possible to protect elderly people, even nursing home residents with comorbidities, with high but not total effectiveness  . . . . . .

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