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Coronavirus: NJ must step up to meet nursing home crisis within a crisis | Editorial
Editorial, USA Today Network New Jersey
"I see people crying," a worker at the New Jersey Veterans Home in Paramus said about the staff there — a staff that finds itself under a siege of death and illness due to the coronavirus pandemic. "We go to the side and we cry with each other. Who do we have to talk to? We are afraid we're going to die with the residents."
Those sobering, haunting words are a chilling reminder that this scourge, also known as COVID-19, continues to take its heavy human toll in illness and death.
For all the social distancing protocols, and all the valiant efforts of front-line health care workers, the spread of the coronavirus continues to strike with full, unforgiving force on New Jersey's most vulnerable populations — including those elderly, often feeble residents of our state's nursing homes. What's worse, the virus's march through the long-term care facilities may be silently feeding a new surge of illness yet to come.
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As recent reporting by the USA TODAY Network — New Jersey indicates, the surge of deaths and COVID-19-related illnesses at these homes amounts to an "unseen crisis," if not a crisis within a crisis.
As health writer Lindy Washburn of the Network reported, the coronavirus disease has killed at least 10 residents at the Paramus veterans' home, and likely contributed to the deaths of some 27 more over the past two weeks. Six residents have been hospitalized, 70 are ill and dozens of staff members have been diagnosed or are awaiting test results, according to official and inside sources. To cope with the crisis, a team of 36 medics from the Army National Guard is to be deployed to the facility.
We want to hear from you: Is there a coronavirus threat in your nursing home?
Sadly, the goings-on at the Paramus veterans home are only one tragic chapter in a larger narrative that grows sadder — and more deadly — by the hour.
Indeed, more than half of the nursing homes in New Jersey have reported that their residents have coronavirus disease. An emergency plan to separate sick residents at certain designated homes in order to protect others from exposure was announced Tuesday by the state health commissioner.
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Meanwhile, residents of long-term care facilities account for 10% of the state's more than 1,700 deaths so far, a number that likely underestimates the impact because so few have been tested. Ocean County is particularly at risk. It has the highest percentage of residents over 65 in the state —22%.
Front-line staff at long-term care centers are tired and scared. They have been forced to work without proper protective gear, compelled to go to work sick or risk termination, and punished for speaking out. They say they have become unknowing carriers of the virus, bringing it home and fostering its invisible spread.
These institutions have long been underfunded, short-staffed and reliant on low-wage labor. In the fight against the coronavirus, they now find themselves overwhelmed, and may harbor dozens of new clusters of coronavirus illness around the state.
The state must get nursing home staff all the protective equipment they need. And we must all demand greater transparency about working conditions at these facilities. Families need to be getting all due information about their loved ones' conditions that the law allows.
As in any war, the pressing battle front can shift from day to day. The onslaught facing nursing homes in New Jersey is the newest front in the fight against the coronavirus.
These homes need resupply and reinforcements, and they need them now. Hundreds of lives, young and old, healthy and sick, are on the line.