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We must do our part to make county safer for loved ones in nursing homes

Intelligencer Journal - 7/8/2020

THE ISSUE

As LNP | LancasterOnline’s Heather Stauffer reported Saturday, nursing home residents and their families still are struggling with the restrictions imposed by the commonwealth in mid-March to protect residents from COVID-19. As Stauffer noted, the highly infectious disease has claimed “close to 300 residents’ lives in a county with roughly 7,700 nursing and personal care home beds.” Nursing home visitation policies are set by the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Following federal guidance, that state agency recently said in-person visits can resume once a home has at least 28 consecutive days without a new case of the virus. “End-of-life visits are permitted,” Stauffer noted, “and, if a nursing home allows it, so are window visits, where visitors remain outside but can see residents through glass.”

The health effects of loneliness can be serious.

As the National Institute on Aging has noted, “Research has linked social isolation and loneliness to higher risks for a variety of physical and mental conditions: high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease and even death.”

That is understandably the fear of the children of Brethren Village residents Helen Keller, 87, and her husband, Harold Keller, who’s 88.

The two have been separated for more than 100 days because he is in skilled nursing and she is in personal care, and so they’ve only been able to see one another in three supervised visits through glass.

A photo published in LNP | LancasterOnline of the couple shows the two smiling and sweetly holding hands before the lockdown. They have been married for 67 years. It must be incredibly difficult for them to be separated from one another — and from their children. We send them our warmest wishes and sincere hopes that the separation will end soon.

They aren’t the only ones, of course, who are separated from their loved ones. Jamie Schell — a local representative of the state’s ombudsman program, which advocates for the rights of nursing home residents and their families — told Stauffer that before the pandemic shutdown, many family members visited their loved ones multiple times a week, helping to care for them. Now, heartbreakingly, some nursing home residents are interpreting their isolation as abandonment.

We don’t blame the nursing homes for this. COVID-19 has been a merciless killer of the elderly. They’ve necessarily heeded the strict measures imposed by the state.

We think the answer lies with us.

All of us.

Stauffer interviewed Dr. Leon Kraybill, who’s chief of Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health’s geriatric division and post-acute care and medical director at Luther Acres in Lititz, where the novel coronavirus has claimed 29 lives.

If the state’s 28-day nursing home visitation guideline is going to be met, the rates of COVID-19 infection in the county’s general population are going to need to be lower.

And, as Kraybill said, “I do not hear enough broad community support of wearing the masks that I think would allow us to get to that low level.”

In the months since a stay-at-home order first was imposed on Lancaster County and then partially lifted, we’ve been dismayed by the attitude of some people — including some elected officials — who have seemed to regard nursing homes as separate from our community.

They spoke of COVID-19 as if it were only a problem for nursing homes and their residents. They seemed to want to wall off nursing homes so the rest of us could resume our normal lives without having to deal with the annoyances of COVID-19 restrictions and safety measures.

Kraybill seemed to push back against this sentiment in a column published in LNP | LancasterOnline in May, and we were glad he did: “Nursing home lives are not just expendable numbers to be added or subtracted from daily tallies. They are individuals with life stories. They are our parents, our friends and eventually us.”

As we’ve asserted before, nursing homes cannot be placed in a bubble. As long as nursing home staff members encounter fellow county residents who are not taking seriously enough the threat of COVID-19, nursing home residents will continue to get ill. And they’ll continue to need to be separated from the loved ones they desperately want to see — and who desperately want to see them.

So for what probably seems like the zillionth time we’ve said this, please mask up when you leave your home. It’s no longer a suggestion — it’s a state requirement.

Continue to keep distances of at least 6 feet from people who aren’t part of your household.

If you’re fairly young and fit, you may get COVID-19 and experience no symptoms or just mild ones — but you may sicken someone else. Who sickens someone else. Who sickens someone else.

The elderly residents of Lancaster County’s nursing homes built our communities, our institutions, our families. They served in this nation’s military. They volunteered at their places of worship, for their children’s extracurricular groups and teams, and for local nonprofits. They baked for baked sales, and staffed the tables at fundraising events. They worked hard to provide for, and care for, the children turned adults who now aren’t permitted to see them.

They deserve more consideration from us than they’re getting.

Any insistence on the liberty to go unmasked imperils their freedom to enjoy the simple but essential pleasure of seeing their loved ones in person.

According to LNP | LancasterOnline data, our COVID-19 numbers are trending downward: In the seven days between June 30 and July 6, the county had 3,641 test results and 188 new cases, for a positive result rate of 5.2%. That compares to a positive test result rate of 7.9% over June 23 through 29.

We need to keep those numbers heading in the right direction. Not just for ourselves and the health care providers charged with caring for COVID-19 patients, but for the senior citizens who have done so much for us, and now need us to do this for them.

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Crédito: THE LNP | LANCASTERONLINE EDITORIAL BOARD

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