Care home lockdowns spread Covid, says study

A newly published peer-reviewed paper, relying on standard epidemiological models, indicates that locking down a vulnerable population, (as done with the elderly with in care homes during the Covid pandemic, significantly increases their risk of infection. 

"Rather Die of COVID than Loneliness." Photo by Anne Delaney, Greeley Tribune, 2020. 

Study says COVID confinement to care homes spread sickness | Western Standard | Lee Harding: 

November 5, 2023 - "A new Canadian scientific paper asserts isolating a vulnerable population together, such as the elderly in care homes, has bad results according to standard epidemiology. Governments purported to apply standard epidemiological models to create infectious disease policies during the COVID period by 'protecting' vulnerable elderly individuals by isolating them from the general population in care homes....

"[The] paper published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS One, scientists at CORRELATION demonstrate isolating vulnerable people from the healthier majority of the population actually produces the worst possible outcomes for them, according to these same standard epidemiological models of spread and transmission. The article, entitled Predictions from standard epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people into care facilities, was authored by Joseph Hickey, PhD and Denis G. Rancourt, PhD, of the non-profit CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest based in Ottawa, Canada.

"The paper shows the standard epidemic models, which have existed in the scientific literature for decades prior to the WHO’s COVID-19 pandemic declaration of March 11 2020, unambiguously predict a significant increase in the infectious disease attack rate for the vulnerable population when it is isolated and segregated from the general population. 

[T]he vulnerable population is harmed by isolation from the robust population and benefits from mixing with or dilution within the robust population, in terms of risk of infection during the course of the epidemic or pandemic.... Whereas governments used theoretical epidemic models to justify most public health policies during the COVID era, within a tunnel vision of reducing risk of infection with a particular virus, they appear not to have considered what those same models predict about infection rates under conditions of care home segregation; and they appear to have disregarded the exponential increase of infection fatality rate with age.

"The paper further asserts 'Care home segregation policies may have been responsible for many deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Western countries.' Confining vulnerable people together makes it more likely that if one person contracts a contagious disease, so too will the others stuck together with them.

“'Increasing the share of a vulnerable person’s interactions that are with other vulnerable people, by confining them together in the same facility, increases the likelihood of infection of the vulnerable person during the course of the epidemic or pandemic, because infected vulnerable people remain infectious for a long time, relative to robust people,” the paper explains. 'The only exception to this general rule occurs if the contact frequency for vulnerable individuals is so small that no epidemic would occur in the vulnerable group if it were completely segregated from the robust majority of society....

"CORRELATION is a registered not-for-profit organization conducting independent scientific research on topics of public interest, and is entirely funded by individual public donations."

Read more: https://www.westernstandard.news/news/study-says-covid-confinement-to-care-homes-spread-sickness/49820

Read study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293556

Ontario nurses abandoning health-care system

Burnt-out Canadian nurses are shipping out for better working conditions and pay | Globe & Mail - Batsakhi Roy:

July 5, 2022 - "When it comes to her work life, Maha Hassan is in a better place. She quit her job as an emergency room nurse at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto earlier this year to work as a travel nurse at a hospital in Texas. Now, she is getting paid three times her salary in Canada and working only three shifts a week – 36 hours – as opposed to the punishing 70-80 hours she was working in Toronto.... [S]ays Ms. Hassan[,]. 'In Ontario, you must work two days shifts, two nights and then you get five days off. I would spend most of my time just recovering from these shifts because we wouldn’t get breaks'.... 

"Ms. Hassan, like many of her peers, was thrust into the thick of the pandemic as an ER nurse at St. Michael’s.... [She] recalls the relentless pressure she and her fellow nurses were under at that time. The ... ER was often short 10-12 nurses and those present would be working for 12 hours without a break.... With St. Michael’s Hospital being a Level 1 trauma hospital, critically ill patients were coming in all the time.... Ms. Hassan started looking at her options and decided to make the move to Texas....

"In a recent survey by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), 87 percent of more than 2600 hospital registered practical nurses (RPNs) said they have considered leaving their nursing job after the pandemic because of working conditions and abusive behaviour directed at them by families of patients.

"Staffing levels in Canadian hospitals are being impacted too. Statistics Canada reported that job vacancies in the health care and social assistance sector reached an all-time high of 136,800 in the first quarter of 2022, rising nearly 91 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2020.... Staff shortages at hospitals, delayed patient care and increased wait times have led frustrated patients to vent at hospital staff, with some incidents even turning violent.... [S]ays Monica Dey, a charge nurse at Milton District Hospital[,] 'We spent three months being heroes. And now we get yelled at and cursed at because of the wait times'....

"Experts say that urgent measures need to be taken to alleviate the intense pressure on nurses and other health care workers. 'We just haven’t kept up with enough people [and] with enough training to deal with the kind of situations that are happening and so they burn out,' says Pat Armstrong, professor emeritus and distinguished research professor of sociology at York University in Toronto. '[Nurses] work through their lunches. They come in early, they stay late. They work double shifts,' Dr. Armstrong says. 'You can’t survive on doing that'.... 

"Dr. Armstrong and her research team did a survey of staffing in long-term care in Nordic countries and in Canada.... The survey showed that there were two big differences between the Nordic countries and Canada. One was the staffing levels, and the other was the degree of autonomy that the nurses had – the extent to which they could figure out how to do it themselves based on their skill as opposed to being told what to do. 

"In Norway long-term care, for example, there are a high number of registered nurses on staff, notes Dr. Armstrong. These nurses are involved in direct care of the patient and there is a continuity of care and familiarity with the patient which is invaluable. When nurses have more control over their work, they perform better and are more satisfied with their jobs, she adds.... 

"'We see nurses, all the time, figure out how to do things, but they need the time to do that right – how to respond to an individual or how to share their knowledge, how to learn from each other. What we need is just a lot more respect for the skills that nurses have and give them the tools they need to exercise those skills.'"

Read more: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-nurses-moving-abroad/

UK care home residents still being locked down

Revealed: The care home residents who are trapped in endless Covid lockdowns as normality returns for rest of us | Daily Mail - Miles Dilworth: 

April 3, 2022 - "Many care home residents are trapped in ‘endless’ lockdowns due to draconian Covid guidance – despite the rest of the country opening up. More than half of homes in parts of England have suspended family visits and some dementia sufferers have not seen loved ones since New Year.

"In January, ministers lifted the long-standing cap on visitors after a campaign by the Daily Mail. But care homes have continued to lock down under existing guidance if they have an ‘outbreak’ of two or more cases. Elderly residents have been unable to see relatives for months and some people with dementia are being kept in their rooms for 24 hours a day.... Staff are included in outbreak counts, meaning some care homes have been in lockdown for months with zero cases among residents....

"Around 30 per cent of care homes are currently experiencing a Covid outbreak, according to an audit of councils.  More than half of the 286 homes in Lincolnshire are closed to visitors due to Covid outbreaks, but in Enfield, north London, only one care home has shut its doors to visitors despite eight out of 83 sites experiencing outbreaks....

"Rather Die of COVID than Loneliness." Photo by Anne Delaney, Greeley Tribune, 2020. 

"Helen Wildbore, of the Relatives & Residents Association charity, said: ‘Over two years into the pandemic and this is still no “freedom day” for people living in care.’  Diane Mayhew, of campaign group Rights for Residents, said: ‘The Health Secretary has said that we’ve got to learn to live with Covid. So why does that not apply to people unfortunate enough to live in care homes? The choice of seeing their family has been taken away from them. It’s an abuse of their rights.’

"A Government spokesman said: ‘Even during a Covid-19 outbreak, we are clear that every resident can continue to receive one visitor inside the care home.’

"Bethany Robinson says her mother has no quality of life due to ‘rolling lockdowns’ at her care home. The home in Telford, Shropshire, has been free of visiting restrictions for just five weeks since October..... Her care home was in lockdown due to a Covid outbreak from October to late November. It reopened to visitors for just two weeks before restrictions were reimposed because of further cases. It remained in lockdown until March, reopened for three weeks, then stopped visits again after two staff members tested positive. No residents have tested positive during the latest lockdown.

"Mrs Robinson, 32, who works in a call centre, has been the only person able to visit her mother during the lockdowns as her essential caregiver. But she said Mrs Tart badly misses the rest of her family.... She added: ‘Sadly, mum hasn’t got a lot of time left. She won’t be able to take part in the activities she enjoys much longer so it’s frustrating for me to see her life at the moment.... There’s a big difference between giving someone a long life but if that life has no quality, there is no point in that.’" 

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10682013/The-care-home-residents-trapped-endless-Covid-lockdowns.html

Lockdowns were a failure based on a falsehood, says epidemiologist in new book

Britain got it wrong on Covid: long lockdown did more harm than good, says scientist | The Guardian - Robin McKie:

January 2, 2022 - "There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. 'Everyone is at risk,' he announced. And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. 

"'I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,' [Woolhouse] says. 'In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15. And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir. 

'We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt' he argues '... to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy. We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked'. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.'

"Rather than imposing blanket lockdowns across the nation, the government should have adopted measures designed to make contacts safe, Woolhouse maintains. 'You can see from the UK data that people were reducing their contacts with each other as cases rose and before lockdown was imposed. That, coupled with Covid-safe measures, such as masks and testing, would have been sufficient to control spread.' Largely voluntary behaviour change worked in Sweden and it should have been allowed to progress in the UK, argues Woolhouse. 

"Instead, we plumped for an enforced national lockdown, in part because, for the first time in history, we could. Enough business is now done online to allow large parts of society to function fairly well – through video conferences and online shopping. 'But it was a lazy solution to a novel coronavirus epidemic, as well as a hugely damaging one,' he adds.

"However, Woolhouse is at pains to reject the ideas of those who advocated the complete opening up of society, including academics who backed the [Great] Barrington Declaration which proposed the Covid-19 virus be allowed to circulate until enough people had been infected to achieve herd immunity. 'This would have led to an epidemic far larger than the one we eventually experienced in 2020,' says Woolhouse. 'It also lacked a convincing plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised.'

"Instead, the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. 'Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,' says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions.

"The nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on provision of routine testing and in helping to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others and that would still have amounted to a small fraction of the £300bn we eventually spent on our pandemic response, he argues. Indeed, Woolhouse is particularly disdainful of the neglect of 'shielders', such as care home workers and informal carers. 'These people stood between the vulnerable and the virus but, for most of 2020, they got minimal recognition and received no help.' Britain spent a fortune on suppressing the virus and will still be servicing the debt incurred for generations to come, he adds. 'By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community'....

"And Woolhouse is emphatic that further lockdowns are not the way to deal with future waves of Covid-19. 'Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. They signify a failure of public health policy,' he states."

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/britain-got-it-wrong-on-covid-long-lockdown-did-more-harm-than-good-says-scientist

The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir on Amazon

UK gov't set to fire 50,000 care home workers

Care homes in England set to lose 50,000 staff as Covid vaccine becomes mandatory | The Guardian - Robert Booth:

November 10, 2021 - "Tens of thousands of care home residents face losing vital support as unvaccinated carers clock off for the last time before double vaccinations become mandatory. About 50,000 care home staff who have not had two doses in England will not be allowed to work from Thursday. Analysis by the Guardian suggests that on current staff/resident ratios and without other measures to tackle the problem, the care of about 30,000 people could be affected.

"On Wednesday, care leaders pleaded with the health secretary for an 11th hour reprieve, urging Sajid Javid to allow unvaccinated carers to keep working at least until NHS staff face mandatory vaccines from next April.... Nadra Ahmed, executive chair of the National Care Association, which represents independent providers who are expected to be worst hit by staff shortages, said: 'There is still time to bring the deadline in line with the NHS and support the sector to have a fighting chance to get through the winter months. It may avoid the closure of essential beds when we most need them as a nation.'

"Care operators and health leaders have warned that staff shortfalls could prevent thousands of people from being discharged from hospitals this winter, limiting admissions and clogging up wards. They say it will increase pressure on remaining care staff to work longer hours, despite many being already exhausted.

"One of the largest not-for-profit operators, MHA, estimates that about 750 care homes may have already stopped taking new admissions because of the staffing crisis. Seven of its homes are closed to new entrants and it is losing up to 150 staff because of the vaccine policy this week....

"The Department of Health and Social Care has said councils will help care operators with staff shortages, that it has provided town halls with over £1bn of additional funding for social care this year, and that it is running a TV recruitment campaign.

"The National Care Forum, which represents not-for-profit care homes, said a snap survey last week showed that on average 3.5% of operators’ staff have already left as a result of resignation or dismissal, and estimate a further 4.4% might leave. Care operators fear remaining staff may be so stretched they will have no choice but to limit help with all but the most essential services, meaning trips out, games and entertainment, which create the sense of living rather than merely existing, will be reduced.

"On Wednesday, the Relatives and Residents Association warned that care home residents’ human rights continue to be breached as 'the only group still living under stringent government restrictions whilst the rest of the country gets back to normal'. Amid anger at ongoing visiting restrictions, it has told an investigation into the issue by parliament’s joint committee on human rights that it 'hears daily [on its helpline] about the devastating impact measures to manage the pandemic have had on the lives of older people'."

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/10/care-homes-in-england-set-to-lose-50000-staff-as-covid-vaccine-becomes-mandatory 

Ontario care home report shows gov't failure

Ontario’s LTC report exposes the real COVID story — systemic government failure | Financial Post - Terence Corcoran:

May 05, 2021 - "One of the most influential concepts in modern economics is 'market failure.' Here’s a standard textbook definition: Market failure is a 'situation in which a market left on its own fails to allocate resources efficiently.' The concept is used to justify competition laws, trade restrictions, regulations, bureaucratic oversight, even government takeovers. Health care is one of the areas where private sector market failure is said to be endemic; government must fix the failure.

"As COVID-19 rips through the global economy, evidence of market failure is non-existent. What we have instead is ... [s]tate bungling, inefficiency, ineptitude, confusion, bad planning or no planning, ... on display in every COVID-stricken nation. The existence and scale of these failures has yet to be fully documented, but a new report from a local commission set up to investigate the province of Ontario’s long-term care (LTC) fiasco opens a small window on a global phenomenon: systemic government failure.

"What happens when a government is left to its own devices is far worse than mere lost efficiency. In the year between March 2020 and April 2021, almost 4,000 elderly residents of Ontario’s long-term care facilities died from COVID-19, the result of decades of government neglect and policy failure — a tragic story documented in brilliant clarity in the final report of the province’s Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission. Chaired by former Superior Court Justice Frank Marrocco, the commission has delivered a scathing indictment of the province’s decades-long failure to heed provincial, national and international warnings that a COVID-like pandemic was inevitable.... 

"When COVID struck in early 2020 Ontario had no pandemic plan in place, nor did Ottawa. Over the years, through the 2003 SARS viral outbreak, the H1N1 events in 2009 and the Ebola threat of 2014-16, numerous reports and studies warned of the need to prepare for a serious killer pandemic. Nothing happened. By 2017, Ontario’s auditor general warned that the province was 'vulnerable to a large-scale emergency.' In 2019, a WHO-sponsored agency called on nations to prepare for the worst: 'A rapidly spreading, lethal respiratory pathogen pandemic'....

"At the same time, the province had earlier ordered its stockpile of emergency health supplies — amassed after the SARS 2003 outbreak — to be destroyed after it was discovered the supplies had expired. By 2019, millions of masks and other protective gear had not been replaced, leaving Ontario without essential protection equipment....

"The LTC commission also hints at the long-neglected cost-benefit problem. 'The economic cost of the pandemic has been significant, dwarfing the cost of proper pandemic preparation. Ontario’s gross domestic product declined by approximately $45-billion as a result of the pandemic. In addition, the province anticipates approximately $25-billion in additional expenses'.....

"The report is particularly relevant as insight into the limits within Canada’s health-care system. One of the important causes of Ontario’s high LTC death rate was the attempt to maneuver around a chronic problem, lack of hospital beds.... 'The number of acute care hospital beds in Ontario has stayed effectively the same for 20 years, at around 20,000 while the province’s population has grown by three million people. Ontario now has fewer acute care hospital beds per capita than any other province: 1.4 beds for every 1,000 people. That’s on par with Mexico, and half the number in the U.S. To accommodate the influx of COVID cases, the province decided to move hospitalized patients to long-term care facilities.....

"The COVID crisis, first and foremost, has revealed the failings of a government controlled health-care system. The long wait times and lack of hospital beds date back to the 1990s, when hospitals were consolidated in a move to cut costs."

Read more: https://financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-ontarios-ltc-report-exposes-the-real-covid-story-systemic-government-failure

Ontario seniors beg to be allowed outside this year

Long-term care residents beg to go outside after year-long COVID-19 confinement | CBC News Toronto - Colin Perkel:

March 30, 2021 - "Residents of Ontario's long-term care homes begged on Tuesday to be allowed outside, saying anti-pandemic restrictions that have confined them indoors for more than a year make no sense given almost all have now been vaccinated. Some compared their situations to solitary confinement, and urged the provincial government to act on what they called a gross violation of their basic human rights.

"Chuck Ferkranus, a resident of a home in Newmarket, Ont., said no one in the building has COVID-19 and yet residents are stuck in their rooms. Ferkranus, who challenged those in authority to live as he does for even a week, said residents are being treated worse than criminals. 'We did nothing wrong; we're not guilty of any crime,' he said. 'If vaccinations don't end the rules, if no one having COVID doesn't end the restrictions, then what does it take before this comes to an end?'

"Many of an estimated 150,000 nursing home residents have been confined to their rooms or floors for as long as 15 months now, cut off from most relatives as well as the outdoors.... Advocates also say the restrictions make no sense. Scientific evidence, they note, indicates COVID-19 is far less likely to spread outdoors than indoors. They also point to evidence that extreme isolation is physically and mentally damaging, especially to residents of nursing homes, many of whom suffer cognitive difficulties and need familiar faces and touch....

"Alfred Borg, another resident in Newmarket, said he hasn't been allowed outside for more than a year or even had a shower for five or six months. Instead, he said, residents only get in-room sponge baths when even the law guarantees twice a week baths or showers. 'All day long we just sit in our room,' Borg said. 'Why are we being treated so much differently from everyone else? It is not enough just being alive. We need a better quality of life.'

"Dr. Amit Arya, a palliative care physician in long-term care, said quality of life is crucial and infection control can't be allowed to trump all. The restrictions, he said, cannot be justified in light of the 'profound harm' social isolation and loneliness can cause seniors. Jane Meadus, a lawyer, called the restrictions a violation of human rights.... 'All along, these detentions have been illegal,' Meadus said....

"At a news conference on Tuesday, Ford expressed some sympathy but gave no indication he would act on the concerns.... Health Minister Christine Elliott confirmed more than 90 per cent of long-term care residents have been fully vaccinated but did not address the confinement issue."

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-confinement-1.5969825

Cuomo's office altered care home deaths report

Cuomo Aides Rewrote Nursing Home Report to Hide Higher Death Toll | New York Times - J. David Goodman & Danny Hakim: 

March 4, 2021 - "Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic. The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

"The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.

"After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes. But Mr. Cuomo and his aides actually began concealing the numbers months earlier, as his aides were battling their own top health officials, and well before requests for data arrived from federal authorities.... 

"The central role played by the governor’s top aides reflected the lengths to which Mr. Cuomo has gone in the middle of a deadly pandemic to control data, brush aside public health expertise and bolster his position as a national leader in the fight against the coronavirus.... The aides who were involved in changing the report included Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s top aide; Linda Lacewell, the head of the state’s Department of Financial Services; and Jim Malatras, a former top adviser to Mr. Cuomo brought back to work on the pandemic. None had public health expertise....

"The tension over the death count dated to the early weeks of the pandemic when Mr. Cuomo issued an order preventing nursing homes from turning away people discharged from the hospital after being treated for Covid-19. The order was similar to ones issued in other states aimed at preventing hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. But by late spring, Republicans were suggesting that the order had caused a deadly spread of the virus in nursing homes. Mr. Cuomo disputed that it had. Still, critics and others seized on the way the state was publicly reporting deaths: Unlike other states, New York excluded residents who had been transferred to hospitals and died there, effectively cloaking how many nursing home residents had died of Covid-19....

"Health officials, nursing home operators and even some of Mr. Cuomo’s aides expressed bafflement at the governor’s apparent insistence on delaying the release of the data for so long, as none of the information released so far has changed the overall number of Covid-19 deaths in New York — now more than 47,000, including more than 15,000 nursing home residents. 

"But the July report allowed Mr. Cuomo to treat the nursing home issue as resolved last year, paving the way for him to focus on touting New York’s success in controlling the virus. ''I am now thinking about writing a book about what we went through,' Mr. Cuomo said four days after the report’s release.... By that point, he was already seeking formal approval from a state ethics agency to earn outside income from book sales, according to a person with knowledge of his planning at the time."

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/nyregion/cuomo-nursing-home-deaths.html

Inaccurate modelling led to care home deaths

How the Gates Foundation seeded America's COVID-19 policy catastrophes | The Dossier - Jordan Schachtel

February 16, 2021 - "New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is finally facing the heat for his botched and criminally negligent coronavirus response policies, yet no one seems to be asking why Cuomo and select governors made the fateful decisions that led to the excess deaths — and the coverup campaigns — of tens of thousands of senior citizens in New York and elsewhere across the United States.... Cuomo ... is far from the only governor who executed the 'nursing home death warrants.' Governor Cuomo was accompanied by the governors of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere.

"The common thread seen in the United States is the delegation of state policy to prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution that is wholly controlled and funded (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In March and early April, politicians were informed by the modeling 'experts' at Gates-funded IHME that their hospitals were about to be completely overrun by coronavirus patients. Modelers from IHME claimed this massive surge would cause hospitals to run out of lifesaving equipment in a matter of days, not weeks or months.... 

"On two separate April 1 and April 2 press conferences, Cuomo made clear that his policy decisions were based off of the IHME model. 'There is a group that is funded by the Gates Foundation. Thank you very much Bill Gates,' Cuomo said on April 1 in discussing ICU needs and how he was using Gates models to make other healthcare policy decisions. 'There's only one model that we look at that has the number of projected deaths which is the IHME model which is funded by the Gates Foundation,' Cuomo said on April 2, adding, 'and we thank the Gates Foundation for the national service that they've done.'

"In an April 9 briefing, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer referred to the IHME model in order to project deaths and the PPE resources needed for the supposed surge. It was the same story with the government of Pennsylvania. The PA Health Department exclusively uses IHME models to forecast coronavirus outcomes. Governor Phil Murphy, another nursing home death warrant participant, used IHME models to navigate the state’s policy response. 

"It wasn’t just state governors relying on this data; federal bureaucrats Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, both of whom have substantial ties to the Gates network, used the IHME COVID-19 forecasting models (which Birx endorsed specifically as the best prediction modeling outfit) to make policy recommendations to states. In her White House briefings, Birx, who simultaneously had a seat on the board of a Gates-funded institution, almost exclusively relied on IHME models to project outcomes.... 

"These models, and the policy decisions that were made by relying on them, set off a chain of events that led to indefinite lockdowns, complete business closures, statewide curfews, and most infamously, the nursing home death warrants. States across the nation went to extremes, resorting to full bunker mode while waiting for bodies to start dropping in the streets, but the IHME modeling never panned out. Hospital capacity was never threatened. Most states that had created 'surge capacity' pop-up health care centers never even used these facilities. 

"IHME, for its part, regularly 'adjusts' its models, and has never acknowledged their routine failures to forecast outcomes. Gates has never discussed the catastrophic failures of his prized 'health metrics' forecasting organization.... Instead, he has seamlessly washed his hands of COVID mania, and has moved on to demanding that the western world sacrifice itself in the name of the latest 'crisis' that is climate change."

Read more: https://dossier.substack.com/p/how-the-gates-foundation-seeded-americas

Aide admits Cuomo regime hid care home deaths

Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa admits they hid nursing home data so feds wouldn’t find out | New York Post - Bernadette Hogan, Carl Campanile and Bruce Golding:

February 11, 2021 - "Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them 'we froze' out of fear that the true numbers would 'be used against us' by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned. The stunning admission of a coverup was made by secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because 'right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,' according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.

“'He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,' DeRosa said.... In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump 'directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.... Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us'.... 

"After dropping the bombshell, DeRosa asked for 'a little bit of appreciation of the context' and offered what appears to be the Cuomo administration’s first apology for its handling of nursing homes amid the pandemic. But instead of a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors or the critics who say the Health Department spread COVID-19 in the care facilities with a March 25 state Health Department directive that nursing homes admit [Covid-positive] patients, DeRosa tried to make amends with the fellow Democrats for the political inconvenience it caused them....

“'So we do apologize,' she said. 'I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans'....

"Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens), who took part in the call, told The Post on Thursday that DeRosa’s remarks sounded 'like they admitted that they were trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence that might put the administration or the [Health Department] in further trouble with the Department of Justice.... Kim, whose uncle is presumed to have died of COVID-19 in a nursing home in April, also said he wasn’t satisfied with DeRosa’s apology....

"In addition to stonewalling lawmakers on the total number of nursing home residents killed by COVID-19, Cuomo’s administration refused requests from the news media — including The Post — and fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Empire Center on Public Policy. Instead, it only disclosed data on the numbers of residents who died in their nursing homes.

"But after state Attorney General Letitia James last month released a damning report that estimated the deaths of nursing home residents in hospitals would boost the grim tally by more than 50 percent, Health Commissioner Howard Zucker finally released figures showing the combined total was 12,743 as of Jan. 19. Just a day earlier, the DOH was only publicly acknowledging 8,711 deaths in nursing homes. In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Zucker said the total number of nursing home residents killed by COVID-19 had increased to 13,297. That number jumps to 15,049 when assisted living/adult care facilities are factored in.

"The controversy generated by James’ report led to an infamous news conference at which Cuomo callously dismissed the matter of where nursing home fatalities actually took place. 'Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died,' he said."

Read more: https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/cuomo-aide-admits-they-hid-nursing-home-data-from-feds/

Lockdown lovely for Queen, but not for all seniors

Lockdown 'Is the Only Slight Rest' the Queen Has 'Had in Her Whole Life,' Says Source | People - Simon Perry: 

January 27, 2021 - "After decades of royal duty, Queen Elizabeth's schedule has slowed amid lockdown. The coronavirus pandemic has provided an unexpected reprieve for the 94-year-old monarch, an insider tells PEOPLE in one of this week's cover stories. 'In her twilight years, I'm sure it is quite lovely not to have the pressure' of a full calendar of public events, says the insider. 'It is possible this is the only slight rest she's ever had in her whole life,' adds a source close to the Queen. 'She is well. She's in good fettle.'

"Queen Elizabeth has spent most of past year isolating at Windsor Castle with her husband, Prince Philip, 99. It's a welcomed change for the couple of 73 years — ever since his retirement from royal duties in 2017, Prince Philip usually lives at Wood Farm near Sandringham while the Queen continues her work primarily in London. As they isolate, the couple have dinner together each night."
Read more: https://people.com/royals/queen-elizabeth-lockdown-only-slight-rest-in-life/

LEVY: Loneliness and isolation from lockdowns immeasurable for seniors | Toronto Sun - Sue-Ann Levy: 

January 28, 2021 - "Judi Ritter’s heart just breaks for her 98-year-old aunt who has been pretty much isolated in her room for nearly 11 months in the Bathurst St.-Finch Ave. area home where she’s resided for 2 1/2 years. She told me Wednesday her aunt, Olga Havas, is a Holocaust survivor, nearly blind and needs help with her hearing aids. Ritter said she had a stroke a few years ago and can’t walk — leaving her either in her wheelchair or bedridden at Advent Valleyview Home.... A couple of days ago, Havas begged her daughter to get her out of there and to leave her out on the street 'to die,' said Ritter.

"If Ontario residents are distressed and frustrated by the latest lockdown, think of what a living hell it must be for seniors confined to their rooms in long-term care and retirement homes for now what is going into our 11th month of pandemic restrictions....

"Rather Die of COVID than Loneliness." Photo by Anne Delaney, Greeley Tribune, 2020. 

"Jim Stevens’ 90-year-old mom moved to a Revera retirement in Ottawa three years ago for the social activity and the meals. At 90, he said, Audrey is 'still pretty good,' but being deaf she has trouble understanding what he is saying when he tries to visit her near the front door in a mask. He said he hasn’t been 'past the front door in probably eight months'.... Stevens said his mom tells him that for the longest time they couldn’t go down to the dining room for meals, and they took away the chairs in common areas to keep people apart. Now they can go down to the dining room but have to sit one to a table far apart from the next table. 'She went there for entertainment … there’s been no social activities for months,' Stevens said....

"Elizabeth Bryce, Advent Valleyview’s administrator, said isolation to mitigate any spread is the direction they get from Toronto Public Health.... 'We’re not blaming the people who work there … it’s the system,' Ritter responds. But she said her aunt and all the others who are suffering these inhumane times, deserve better. 'They worked hard all their lives, brought up their families, paid their taxes and contributed to society,' Ritter said. 'They all deserve better than this.'"
Read more: https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/levy-loneliness-and-isolation-from-lockdowns-immeasurable-for-seniors

Dying and lying over New York's COVID19 failure

COVID-19 death rates reveal the states that failed the test: New York and New Jersey | New York Post - Betsy McCaughey:

August 12, 2020 - "It’s hard to know what’s worse — the dying or the lying.

"More than 32,000 New Yorkers have died from the coronavirus, a toll higher than any other state. New York also ranks second to the worst out of all 50 states, in deaths per million residents. Only New Jersey did worse. You wouldn’t know it, listening to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who brags that his administration 'tamed the beast.' Or the media that praise him and chide states with much, much lower death rates.

"Cuomo is doing everything he can to cover up the errors. He’s stonewalling bipartisan efforts in Albany to investigate the deaths of thousands of elderly in nursing homes ravaged by the virus. Legislators need to persevere, and in fact broaden their investigation to include the poor performance of many hospitals in the state. 

"On March 2, one day after the first coronavirus case in New York was disclosed, Cuomo told New Yorkers not to worry because 'we have the best health care system on the planet.' That’s a whopper. Patients treated for COVID-19 in hospitals here died at more than twice the national average. California has had more cases of coronavirus than New York, but less than a third as many deaths....

"Cuomo ... and the department of health spent years stripping New York City’s outer boroughs of sufficient hospital beds and equipment. There are five hospital beds for every 1,000 residents in Manhattan, but only 1.8 beds for every 1,000 Queens and Brooklyn residents. The result? When the pandemic struck, those hospitals were overwhelmed fast. The death rate for COVID-19 patients at Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan was 17%. At Coney Island Hospital, 41% of COVID-19 patients didn’t make it....

"New York state stacks up even worse in protecting elderly nursing home residents from COVID-19. Florida and Texas, both more populous states, have had only one quarter of the number of nursing home fatalities.

"Numbers don’t lie. New York didn’t crush the coronavirus. The virus took thousands of New York lives needlessly, because of the Cuomo administration’s mistakes."

Read more: https://nypost.com/2020/08/12/covid-19-death-rates-reveal-ny-and-nj-are-states-that-failed-the-test/

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How the Cuomovirus ravaged New York

Andrew Cuomo's Coronavirus Response Has Been a Failure | Reason - Billy Binton:

July 17, 2020 -"New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ... has been the subject of several fawning media interviews over the course of the last few months, many of them conducted by his own brother, CNN's Chris Cuomo.... This past Monday he appeared on Jimmy Fallon's first night back.... Fallon praised how 'honest' and 'smart' Cuomo is. 'We're just worried the infections are going to come from the other states now, back to New York, and that would be a tragedy," Cuomo said....

"Passing the buck to other states is a savvy political move. But it obscures Cuomo's own response to COVID-19. As of today, New York has seen more than 32,000 of its residents die from the disease. That's more than seven times the deaths in Florida, about nine times the deaths in Texas, and more than four times the deaths in California.... Of the state's total, more than 22,000 deaths came from New York City....

"Cuomo certainly isn't to blame for all of the state's troubles. Plenty of politicians performed poorly, from President Donald Trump down to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and some factors were outside any official's control. But the governor did plenty wrong....

"In late March, when COVID-19 measures were still in their nascent stages, not much was known about the virus. One thing that was known, though, was that the elderly were significantly more at risk to die should they contract it. Yet Cuomo issued a mandate requiring nursing homes to accept residents who had tested positive for COVID-19, including those who were still at risk for spreading the disease to others. Since then, around 6,500 people in those facilities—about 6.5 percent of the state's nursing home population—have died of COVID-19.... Cuomo has declined to share which nursing homes were affected. The directive was not reversed until May 10.

"Earlier in March, the governor adopted a blasé attitude about the virus. 'This isn't our first rodeo,' he said at a March 2 press conference, after the state's first known case was announced. 'We should relax.' The governor assured everyone that he was implementing a robust contact tracing program that would track down everyone on the patient's flight from Iran. That never happened.

"Once the outbreaks became more widespread, hospitals across the country began depending on their state governments for oxygen supplies.... An over-reliance on Cuomo proved to be a fatal mistake. According to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, many ventilators sent from the state and city, as well as some from the federal government, were old and faulty, and many patients died on them. A spokeswoman for NYC Health + Hospitals told the Journal that many such machines "were not 'ready to go' when they came" and often required additional maintenance. Several health care workers claim that patients assigned those ventilators often worsened with collapsed lungs or similar complications as the machines were not able to provide proper support.

"What's more, Cuomo's near-exclusive focus on ventilators neglected to address other hospital needs, such as the demand for supplemental oxygen and oxygen monitors.... The lack of vital-signs equipment proved detrimental as well. Health care workers detailed stories of patients pulling off their oxygen masks while alone. Without monitors, they died.

"Meanwhile, Cuomo got drawn into a public power struggle with de Blasio. The mayor announced a city-wide shelter-in-place on March 17; Cuomo squashed that on March 18; then Cuomo issued his own stay-at-home order on March 20. Something similar happened when de Blasio announced that the city's schools would remain shuttered through the academic year: Cuomo declared that only he had that authority.... And that back-and-forth may have had consequences beyond prompting confusion. The Journal reports that patients in New York City were often transferred between hospitals without the relevant medical and treatment information, even when those patients were not in stable condition. The city blames the state and the state blames the city.

"But mixed messaging defined Cuomo's initial response to COVID-19, which teetered between cavalier and dismissive. Though he's said he wishes he 'blew the bugle' sooner, he has spent considerably more time blaming the press, the experts, and the president.

"New York's crisis moment has passed for now, with the curve flattened and daily deaths bottoming out.... But if the government's response hadn't been so incompetent, that landmark may have come a lot earlier."

Read more: https://reason.com/2020/07/17/andrew-cuomo-coronavirus-response-new-york-failure/

Investigating Sweden's coronavirus response

by George J. Dance

Lockdown advocates hate Sweden, for good reason. Back in March, Europe (not to mention the rest of the world) seemed to face a choice between mass lockdown or mass death. Only Sweden and Britain resisted the pressure to confine their societies and shut down their economies (and British resistance crumbled in two weeks). Immediately Sweden was condemned for its risky "experiment" with its citizens' lives. (Never mind that nation-wide lockdown was actually the novel, untried experiment.)

Predictions were dire. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College estimated that 80,000 Swedes would die – and that was before the forecast collapse of the country's health care system (which was the real fear driving the lockdowns). Modellers who looked at the latter scenario found even more deaths, as in this study's summary:

Our model for Sweden shows that, under conservative epidemiological parameter estimates, the current Swedish public-health strategy will result in a peak intensive-care load in May that exceeds pre-pandemic capacity by over 40-fold, with a median mortality of 96,000 (95% CI 52,000 to 183,000). 

Now it is July, and there have not been 96,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Sweden – or 80,000 – or even the low-ball estimate of 52,000. There have been 5,400, in a population of 10 million. For comparison, Quebec has 5,500 COVID-19 deaths in a slightly smaller population (8.5 million). Nor, as the historical chart makes clear, is the country on track to reach 52,000 deaths anytime soon:

COVID-19 deaths in Sweden, 11/3/20 - 29/7/20 - courtesy statista.com

The mass death never happened. Yet that has not stopped the pro-lockdown media from pretending it has, giving us lurid stories about the "COVID-19 disaster" of Sweden's "shocking death toll," "the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita in Europe," even "one of the highest per-capita rates of coronavirus death in the world." And the false narrative continues: In its latest iteration, even the Swedes have recognized the danger of letting people work, shop, and visit friends. This week, Business Insider reported:

Sweden's prime minister orders an inquiry into the failure of the country's no-lockdown coronavirus strategy

• Sweden has launched an inquiry into its no-lockdown policy after thousands of coronavirus deaths in the country. 
• Sweden now has the fifth-highest per capita death rate in the world with a larger death toll than all of its neighbours' combined....

Sweden's prime minister has ordered an inquiry into the country's decision not to impose a coronavirus lockdown after the country suffered thousands more deaths than its closest neighbours.
"We have thousands of dead," Swedish prime minister Stefan Lofven said at a press conference on Wednesday, while admitting that the country's handling had exposed Sweden's "shortcomings," The Times of London reported.
"Now the question is how Sweden should change, not if." (stress added)

Notice that Lofven does not himself mention "lockdown" (despite the word's prominence in the article). There is a reason for that, though you have to read to the end of the article to discover it: he was not criticizing the country's "no-lockdown policy," but a different part of the national strategy:

The inquiry announced by Lofven will first consider why approximately half of Sweden's deaths have taken place in its care homes, The Times of London reported.
"We did not manage to protect the most vulnerable, the elderly, despite our best intentions," the prime minister said.

Precisely: Just like in Quebec (and Ontario, and many U.S. states), Sweden's policy failed to protect the vulnerable elderly in nursing and long-term-care homes. That failure was a tragedy and a scandal, but it cannot have been caused by the country's "no-lockdown policy," since the same failure occurred in multiple jurisdictions that did lock down.

That tragedy and scandal should be investigated, in Sweden and in those other jurisdictions; not to assign blame, but to figure out how to prevent such a tthing from ever happening again.  If the lockdown advocates are interested in helping in that goal, their assistance is welcome. But if they are only interested in propagandizing for their new pet social engineering scheme, thanks but no thanks.

80% of Canadian COVID deaths at care homes

Canada’s proportion of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes top 16 other nations: study | Global News - Cassandra Szklarski, Canadian Press:
June 25, 2020 - "A new study finds the proportion of Canadian COVID-19 deaths that have occurred in long-term care facilities is about twice the average of rates from other developed nations. The analysis released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information provides a damning snapshot of senior care as of May 25, when LTC residents made up 81 per cent of all reported COVID-19 deaths in the country compared to an average of 42 per cent among all countries studied....

"The CIHI data compares Canada’s record to that of 16 other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The proportion of LTC deaths ranged from less than 10 per cent in Slovenia and Hungary to 31 per cent in the United States to 66 per cent in Spain. At 5,324, the reported number of LTC deaths in Canada was near the average but data varied widely among countries: from 28 in Australia to 30,000 in the U.S., with more than 10,000 in France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.... [I]n the case of Italy, data was available from only 52 per cent of the nursing homes operating in the country....

"The contrast in LTC deaths is even more stark between provinces and territories, says the report, which notes LTC deaths represented more than 70 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta and 97 per cent of all [63] deaths in Nova Scotia. There were none in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and the territories at the time of the study. Two LTC residents have since died in New Brunswick."
Read more: https://globalnews.ca/news/7106098/canada-coronavirus-seniors-homes-report/

Nobody died in these nursing homes - what did they do right? | CTV News - Solarina Ho:
June 24, 2020 - "In Quebec, centre d'hébergement Sainte-Dorothée, a 285-bed facility in Laval, reported 95 deaths, according to data collected by freelance journalist, Nora Loreto. The Notre-Dame-de-la Merci in Montreal reported 93 deaths in its 398-bed residence. The Quebec government operates both facilities and many other hard hit locations. The province’s coroner ordered a public inquiry into the deaths last week. More than 3,640 out of the more than 5,400 deaths in the province so far have happened at public long-term care homes (CHSLDs). Another 930-plus have been at private care facilities.

"According to Loreto's database of deaths in residential care facilities – collected through public health data, media reports, reports from homes, obituaries and families – nine of the 10 worst-hit homes were in Quebec....  More than 560 homes in Quebec and more than 430 in Ontario have experienced some level of outbreak, according to data compiled by the National Institute on Ageing. But other regions in Canada were not immune: 53 died at Northwood Manor, a 485-bed home in Nova Scotia, while 24 died at Langley Lodge, a 121-bed facility in British Columbia. And overall, Loreto's data shows that more than 7,100 -- roughly 84 per cent -- out of the more than 8,400 deaths related to the coronavirus in Canada have been attributed to nursing homes."
Read more: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/nobody-died-in-these-nursing-homes-what-did-they-do-right-1.4998204

COVID-19 patients sent to nursing homes in NY

Was Governor Cuomo Responsible for the Death of Thousands of Nursing Home Inhabitants? American Institute for Economic Research - Ethan Yang:

June 19, 2020 - "The 56th Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo,... has enjoyed a sky-high approval rating due to his leadership during the ongoing [COVID-19] crisis. However, his record is far from stellar. He may have easily committed one of the greatest atrocities of the crisis: Mandating the transfer of over 4,500 COVID-19 patients to nursing homes full of vulnerable and elderly individuals which eventually saw over 6,000 deaths....

"On March 25th, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order forcing nursing homes to receive patients from overflowing hospitals. The order mandates that 'During this global health emergency, all NHs must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals to NHs'.  As a result over 4,500 COVID-19 patients were forcibly transferred from hospitals to nursing homes regardless of their capacity to accept them.

"According to the Associated Press, 'New York has not mandated testing in its more than 1,150 nursing homes and long-term care facilities'. In fact, the executive order went further to forbid the required testing of COVID-19 within the facilities. The language was as follows: 'No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission'....

"Cuomo himself had said protecting nursing home residents was the state’s top priority, once calling the threat “fire through dry grass. Cuomo was correct about the vulnerability of nursing homes, as the weeks following the executive order saw 6,000 deaths out of the 100,000 New York citizens inhabiting nursing homes.... Nationwide, more than 45,500 residents and staff have died from coronavirus outbreaks at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, according to a running count by The Associated Press. That’s about 40% of more than 115,000 total deaths. Nursing home residents are less than 1% of the U.S. population....

"On May 10, 2020, the executive order was thankfully rescinded, but the Governor and his officials have certainly mounted a defense of their decision. Pro Publica writes that the state Health Department was lax if not completely uninvolved in monitoring what happened after patients were sent to nursing homes. There are also disputed claims on whether or not the state was even recording deaths in nursing homes until late April....

"Pro Publica states that 'The Cuomo administration would not say who conceived of the order or answer the question of whether it believed the order had led to additional deaths. The administration said the Health Department was conducting 'a thorough review' of COVID-19’s impact on nursing homes....

"During a press conference on May 20 Governor Cuomo ... stated that 'anyone who wants to ask, why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes? It’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance'.... Politifact determined this statement to be 'mostly false'.... CDC guidance did not call for the mandatory transfer of patients to nursing homes nor did it prohibit further testing for COVID-19. An official at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services cited a March 13 document that clarifies 'A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 and still under Transmission Based Precautions for COVID-19 as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions.'"

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/was-governor-cuomo-responsible-for-the-death-of-thousands-of-nursing-home-inhabitants/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Retirement homes used to free up hospital space

How shoring up hospitals for COVID-19 contributed to Canada’s long-term care crisis | Globe and Mail - Kelly Granthealth:

May 21, 2020 - "In the early days of Canada’s coronavirus response, when officials were consumed with fears of overwhelmed hospitals and rationed ventilators, a hospital in Oshawa, Ont., discharged an elderly patient named Nina Watt to a nearby nursing home.... Orchard Villa, the nursing and retirement home to which she had been transferred, went on to experience one of the worst outbreaks in the country, with 77 dead of COVID-19, including Ms. Watt.

"Ms. Watt, 86, was one of thousands of seniors discharged to nursing and retirement homes as Ontario, Quebec and other provinces rushed to clear beds for a flood of COVID-19 patients.... At the same time the acute-care sector was searching for space, some hospitals, physicians and long-term care facility administrators were discouraging families from sending infected nursing-home residents to the hospital.... As a result, it appears most of the nursing- and retirement-home residents who have succumbed to COVID-19 in Canada died inside the virus-stricken, understaffed facilities, while many of the hospital beds opened for coronavirus patients sat empty....

"An estimated 80 per cent of the Canadians who’ve died of COVID-19 have been residents of seniors’ facilities, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. No province has been hit harder than Quebec, where 2,355 long-term care residents and 653 retirement-home residents have succumbed to the coronavirus and its resulting COVID-19. Ontario has reported 1,427 deaths among nursing-home patients and 125 among residents of retirement homes, while British Columbia and Alberta have each managed to keep COVID-19 deaths at seniors’ facilities below 100 as of Wednesday.

"At the start of the coronavirus crisis, the Quebec government ... wanted to prevent ... what Premier François Legault called 'an Italian-style scenario,' in which hospitals would run out of ventilators and intensive-care beds. During the month of March, Quebec hospitals were directed to do 'load shedding,' freeing beds by postponing elective procedures and transferring patients.... 'It had to be done, taking people who could be transferred to LTC homes to free beds in hospital and eventually handle the incoming wave caused by COVID-19,' Mr. Legault later told reporters to justify the decision.

"In Ontario, hospitals transferred out nearly 2,200 alternate-level-of-care, or ALC, patients from March 2 to May 3 – 1,589 of them to long-term care homes and 605 to retirement homes, according to the province’s Ministry of Health.... Alberta hospitals discharged 901 patients into long-term care and supportive-living facilities in March and early April.... March transfers were the highest recorded in history, Alberta Health Services said.... Nursing-home patients infected with the coronavirus were never supposed to be denied hospital care if they needed it, according to Ontario’s Ministry of Health, but it’s not clear how much of that message filtered down to the independent players in the system....

"The Quebec government also tried to cut down on movements back toward hospitals. Clinical guidelines issued on March 23 said that residents in long-term care facilities who contracted the new illness should only be sent to hospitals 'on an exceptional basis and after consultation with the doctor on duty'.... Quebec’s Premier and Health Minister insisted that it was better to keep elderly residents in long-term care facilities. 'It is never good to transfer people, to move people to other facilities, including the elderly, who get settled in and then become distraught when they change locations,' Mr. Legault told reporters on April 2.

"A few days later, the Quebec government realized that, with fewer than 700 COVID-19 patients in hospital, the dire forecasts of overwhelmed emergencies and intensive-care units weren’t materializing. At the same time, the increase in deaths among elder-care-home patients was accelerating at a faster pace. By April 10, more than a month after the first COVID-19 case was identified in the province, the Quebec government ordered an end to transfers from hospitals to elder-care homes. Ontario’s Ministry of Health followed suit on April 15, asking hospitals to temporarily halt transfers to long-term care in a memo that said only 64.1 per cent of acute-care beds in the province were in use....

"Toronto Public Health, which reported on coronavirus outbreaks at individual nursing and retirement homes over two weeks in April, found that of as of April 17, only 22 of 899 residents with confirmed cases of COVID-19 were being treated in hospital. That is about 2.5 per cent. By May 1, when there were 1,691 cases in Toronto seniors’ facilities, 95 residents, or 5.6 per cent, were in hospital. In Alberta, there had been 364 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in long-term care as of May 12. Of those, 24 had been hospitalized."

Read more: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-how-shoring-up-hospitals-for-covid-19-contributed-to-canadas-long/