How do nursing homes continue to operate in this scenario?
I hear a lot of people talking about this kind of shield the vulnerable approach, but no-one who can answer the question of how nursing homes work in this condition.
I hear a lot of people talking about this kind of shield the vulnerable approach, but no-one who can answer the question of how nursing homes work in this condition.
In all seriousness, taking any amount of effort to protect nursing homes would be better than what we have right now. Like, "stop sending COVID patients to nursing homes" levels of effort. (Thanks, NY and MI - plus others I'm sure)
Consider: nursing homes have many staff. Most of them are young and badly-paid. In any let it rip scenario, many of these will have Covid, and will bring it into the home.
OK, so let's test everyone. Even ignoring the fact that testing is not 100% accurate and takes time (do you test all staff and have them wait for the results), you'll get loads of staff infected, and who do you replace them with?
It appears in Sweden that a major carrier of Covid into nursing homes was agency staff (short-term people brought in to cover staff gaps). How do you stop this from happening again?
Full disclosure: my mother, father-in-law and mother-in-law are all over 70 with a consequent higher risk level, so this is not abstract to me as I'd like them to survive long enough so that my newborn daughter remembers them.
Nursing homes remain closed to visitors. Staff and residents only. Staff are tested daily for covid. Nursing home residents do not leave the nursing home. Staff and residents wear contact tracing bracelets and residents stay distant from one another.
You do the best you can. The common cold can be deadly for people in nursing homes. We cannot drop the risk to zero.
Daily testing doesn't help much if you end up disqualifying most of your staff.
Like I said, it isn’t going to be perfect. It can’t be perfect. You do the best you can. You don’t shut down the entire US economy because nursing homes aren’t bulletproof.
With daily testing, constant PPE for staff, contact tracing, and other preventive measures it will be fine. It won’t be perfect but it will be fine. It will likely be better than typical.
I am not sure why you think it's more realistic to lock down three million people totally than have most people take moderate precautions. Remember, this is in a proposed scenario in which the average grocery shopper will have a high likelihood of being infected, without masks or any social distancing measures being taken.
The White House tried the "frequent rapid testing" strategy, and that didn't seem to do a very good job of protecting the staff there. Again, this was in the current situation in which we have a relatively low prevalence of contagion, with social distancing measures and masks in the outside environment.
>I am not sure why you think it's more realistic to lock down three million people totally than have most people take moderate precautions.
Realistic? How about legal, likely, or plausible. The March lockdowns aren’t happening again, not on a wide scale. People will riot.