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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

Why does the care facility deserve more blame?

Because risk mitigation is linked to risk profile. Even in non-pandemic times an immunocompromised person or caregiver thereof must behave differently from someone who is not.

If the care facility is housing at-risk patients, they should have strict protocols in place for visitors. Shaming a wedding here seems irresponsible by the media considering these people could have picked up Covid anywhere like Walmart.

It's not irresponsible. Holding these sorts of events without proper protocols increases the risk of secondary infection to society at large. The impact at the nursing home is collateral damage.

Walmart, on the other hand, requires customers to wear masks, and they have and will impose occupancy limits as needed to help minimize exposure.

While we cannot practically reduce the risk of infection to zero, we should also behave wisely. This applies both inside the nursing home and outside it.

Because it's literally their job to protect their patients from infection? It's not like we've just recently found out that the elderly are especially vulnerable to Covid-19.

If a website left their admin portal open, didn't set a password and then got hacked, would you put the blame for that on the script kiddie who did it, or on the website's security team?

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The only way they could have done this was .. preventing their staff from going to the wedding. Or maybe even preventing them from leaving the site.

That's lazy thinking. There are a whole host of things a care facility can do to mitigate risk with various cost/benefits, but the difference is there is an acute risk at the facility while a distributed risk for anyone outside. It obviously makes sense to implement more protections at the vulnerable location than blanket policies across the board.

Not true. The long-term care facility could just have required sick employees to stay home.

From the article:

> A worker at the Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center, a long-term-care facility 100 miles from Millinocket in Madison, Maine, came down with a “fever, chills, cough, myalgia, runny nose, and headache” — all symptoms consistent with COVID-19. This worker’s child had attended the wedding reception, and the two had been in close contact in the days right afterward.

> Despite having obvious signs of illness, the Maplecrest employee went to work that day, and the next.

But that's not enough. Since a person can be infected without having any symptoms, they can operate as a vector and infect the nursing home residents -- all without violating the policy.

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