Coronavirus (political)

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by MTK

It's not about blaming a party, I guess it just points to a bigger issue that our nursing homes are often severely understaffed and we simply haven't done enough to protect the elderly through all of this. I don't accept the answer that well they're old and susceptible, what else can we do.

I get where you're coming from - the carnage is so high with the nursing homes that your gut says there had to be a way of dealing with this. But every tactic I can think of that would have improved matters would have been a much broader, nationwide approach. We should have been prepared to test more quickly, we should have performed contact tracing much more rigorously nationwide and isolated people like Korea does, we should have been much more aggressive in enacting social distancing and stay at home orders sooner.

All of those things would have worked well in nursing homes. But they are also what the entire country needed.

The nursing home residents are bearing the brunt of the administration's overall failures to act with foresight. But containing a pandemic isn't something you can do within a building. You need to stop it from getting inside a building like a nursing home, and that requires much more aggressive action on a much broader scale than anything targeting nursing homes specifically.

In many ways you and I are probably saying the same thing. I'm just turning it to focus on the pandemic as a whole. Fewer elderly folks would have died if we had learned from Asia and implemented the playbook they put into place following SARS. But we didn't and we're learning the hard way.