Shame on Governor Newsom!
35 percent of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in nursing homes, and this need not be! For months, Gov. Gavin Newsom has recklessly pushed to place more coronavirus patients in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Now eldercare facilities have become hotspots for the spread of the virus. And, as we all know by now, the death rate from COVID-19 escalates with age. But, for whatever reason the state continues to press for placing more coronavirus patients in these facilities.
And check this insanity out: an April 24 State guidance memo allows for transfer of patients who do not have COVID-19 symptoms from hospitals to nursing homes WITHOUT REQUIRING COVID-19 TESTING. Indeed, according to a scathing Mercury News editorial from September, the state specifically forbids the nursing homes from requiring such testing.
Not only do nursing homes seem to have no choice in the matter, but the Governor is bribing them as well. He has offered to pay, in some cases $1,000 per day, to assisted living facilities to house COVID-19 patients. That comes on top of his earlier directive that nursing homes should be expected to take coronavirus patients.
Not all professionals are pleased.
“Any guidance from the government that opens the door to send more COVID-19 into a nursing home or assisted living facility, to me, is medically unsound,” said Dr. Michael Wasserman, a geriatrician and the president of the California Association of Long Term Medicine.
Meantime, Newsom’s administration claims California’s prisons are a coronavirus hotbed and he has allowed over 9,000 criminals to be set free, with a plan to release as many as 17,600 criminals. After an ACLU lawsuit, Orange County was ordered to free 1,800 VIOLENT inmates whom the Orange County Sheriff described as “people in for very serious offenses — murder, attempted murder, domestic violence.”
Oh, by the way, 96 California State prison inmates have died in the pandemic alongside nearly 6,000 in California nursing homes.