At least 55 people who lived at a nursing home in Brooklyn, New York, died from the CCP virus.
The Hill reported that a nursing home in the Cobble Hill neighborhood is one of the latest facilities of the sort to be hit hard by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus. It comes after a nursing home in Richmond, Virginia, had 49 deaths; a veteran’s care home in Holyoke, Massachusetts, suffered 48 deaths; and care facility in Kirkland, Washington state, recorded 43 deaths.
There have been a total of 8,003 deaths connected to nursing homes in the United States, with one-third of them taking place in New York, the Associated Press reported.
Prior to the outbreak, the Cobble Hill Health Center had been lively, according to its Facebook page, but in the middle of March, things started to change. Workers at the facility were told in emails from the CEO to ban visitors, screen staff, confine residents, wipe down all surfaces, and attend all meetings in order better prepare everyone for the pandemic.
“I’ll be darned if I’m not going to do everything in my power to protect them,” said CEO Donny Tuchman.
Family members of residents at the Cobble Hill Health Center described the facility as being “under siege,” saying that it was overwhelmed by the pandemic, as well as the shortage of staff, protective equipment, and the lack of availability of reliable testing for the CCP virus, which emerged from mainland China last year and causes the disease COVID-19.
“They were under siege. They were doing the best they could, as far as we could tell at arm’s length, under siege,” said Daniel Arbeeny, the son of an 88-year-old patient who was taken to Cobble Hill Health in March.
“There’s been a lot of lip service about how vulnerable nursing homes have been, and everyone has the best intentions, but it didn’t materialize. The PPE didn’t materialize, the staffing surge didn’t materialize, the testing didn’t materialize,” Tuchman said, according to the Associated Press. “How did we expect this not to spread?”
Tuchman said that he wasn’t sure how the CCP virus got into the facility but noted that several paramedics and staff were permitted to go in and out of the building, according to the Associated Press. Although they were screened with questions and temperature tests, it wasn’t able to detect individuals who might have been asymptomatic but still carrying the virus.
New York has 248,431 confirmed cases of the virus and a total of 18,298 deaths.
