How to Keep Older Adults Imprisoned in Nursing Homes... Forever
If we keep pretending that COVID is an ongoing emergency for the general public of healthy toddlers, children, and adults - my nursing-home dwelling older adults will be imprisoned... forever.
So early on in the COVID-19 pandemic (which started in, hard to believe - 2019 - we’ve been at this for going on three years now), and owing to the novelty of COVID-19 and the frankly scary-sounding statistics on the infection fatality rate of the disease coming from China - we did a whole bunch of things in the United States very quickly. We shut down schools, so-called “non-essential businesses,” and instituted a crazy grab-bag of practices like one-way arrows in grocery stores, plexiglass barriers, and mandatory masking in all public places for all ages.
Now, there were some things that people did that looking back now a couple years later seem pretty extreme (and these are some of the tamer examples I can still find):
Oh wait - I forgot about this one. This was beyond absurd:
Over the last few years, many of these more, well, somewhat unhinged COVID-19 mitigation / avoidance behaviors seem to have largely dropped away. The grocery store arrows are gone. Although the plexiglass barriers remain where I live (I’m in a blue state), I suspect it’s a combination of bureaucratic intransigence and just plain inertia that they remain.
I still do see a lot of masks - including N95s - and even outdoors. This bothers me in part because it’s basically, well, ridiculous from a risk/benefit perspective. What is wrong with people?
First and foremost, it was known extremely early on from data collected, apparently, *in* *China* (the world epicenter of COVID panic, as it were) that the risk of contracting COVID from outdoor contact was extremely remote (citing a study from the Journal “Indoor Air” published in 2020:
Our study does not rule out outdoor transmission of the virus. However, among our 7324 identified cases in China with sufficient descriptions, only one outdoor outbreak involving two cases occurred in a village in Shangqiu, Henan. A 27‐year‐old man had a conversation outdoors with an individual who had returned from Wuhan on January 25 and had symptom onset on February 1. This outbreak involved only two cases.’ (emphasis mine)
GeroDoc - why do you care? Why should that bother you?
Sure - being more than a bit of a libertarian myself, yes - live and let live. Wear whatever bodily adornments you want:
I can accept that to a certain degree. If you want to wear cloth or polypropylene adornments on your face, or a scarf on your head, or hot dogs on your fingers, or whatever - you do you.
But that’s not what gets me so bothered… but before I get to the point of this article, let me share one more thing. This is the one that as a parent, really, really bothers me:
Yeah, I don’t have anything funny to say about this one. Not only was it also known - *early* on, that children are at exceedingly low risk of suffering negative consequences1 of COVID (like I noted here) - we also have parents doing this. Still. In 2022. Outdoors. With children.
So, GeroDoc - What Does this have to do With Your “Nursing Home Prisoners”?
Great question.
A couple of weeks ago it was recently announced in the locality I live in (again, I live in a blue state) that they have re-instituted the local mask mandate for most indoor spaces.
On a basic level this is, well, just plain ridiculous.
Our ICUs aren’t even at capacity (which is the usual go-to, even if the capacity issues have nothing directly to do with COVID issues), and virtually all indications are that, as we all kind of know at this point - case counts are starting to diverge pretty drastically from the grim death numbers we’ve all been focusing on (pulled the data below from Washington Post):
The point is, there is no more emergency.
Let me say it again: the coronavirus emergency is over. It is no longer a “novel” coronavirus - we’re now going on three years into this.
According to some statistics (see my previous post) - because of a combination of widespread vaccinations and natural immunity - COVID has become as, or less lethal than seasonal flu.
Does that mean it’s not a problem though? Of course not - but the point is - when it was early on in the pandemic and we had no idea how COVID was spread and due to the absolutely horrible-sounding numbers coming out of Wuhan, China - the zeitgeist was to do anything, absolutely anything to try and slow this disease down, primarily to give ourselves time to 1) build hospital “surge capacity” (yeah, right) and 2) rush a vaccine to market.
So, we did - people masked, double masked, triple masked. We masked outside. We shut down schools, daycares. We stopped people from doing routine doctor visits. Businesses were shut down. Orchestras practiced in bubbles. People wore empty jugs on their heads and strapped old t-shirts on their faces.
But that was then. This is now, right?
So I mentioned that my locality has re-instituted mask mandates.
What did I do when I first heard about this, as a geriatrician, working for a nursing home which is now a prison??? When my older adults haven’t been allowed to leave for going on three years now???
I got mad. Then I got infuriated. Then I began to seethe. Then I started this Substack.
The fact is - it hit me like a ton of bricks - my nursing home, made up of 60+ individuals with spouses, family members, friends, churches, children, interests and lives - they will never ever get to leave my nursing home again if society continues to engage in this ridiculous farce that COVID is an emergency to continue to justify forcing masks on healthy members of the public.
The Good News about my Local Mask Mandate
The good news is that over the last week or so I’ve been watching people. Even though it’s now technically illegal for a storeowner to allow you in their store if you’re not wearing a mask (even if it’s just one of those bullshit cloth masks which even that notorious COVID grifter and fascist Leana Wen agreed were just “face decorations”) - I’ve noticed that people simply aren’t complying with the mask mandates anymore. Storeowners aren’t enforcing them, and although maybe a few more people are wearing them in stores than they used to - at this point it’s clear that the people who weren’t wearing masks before are largely still not doing so.
So, the general public has already moved on.
Unfortunately at my nursing home - life is still stuck in 2020. They are still in prison. And the longer that this nonsense goes on (and don’t get me started with that awful mayor of New York City who still absurdly and obscenely insists on masking toddlers) - the longer they will stay there. Not dead - but not really living either. Just withering away in nursing home prison:
Suffice it to say, I think the idea of “long COVID” as somehow an argument to mask forever and do basically any sort of ongoing NPIs / mitigations like we’ve been doing, particularly mandatory ones - is utter poppycock. I’ll address my thoughts about “Long COVID” in another article I’m planning, where I talk about medical panics and the mystical ideas people have about panaceas and ‘panapathogens.’