As People Pile Into Florida Restaurants, The COVID-19 Body Count Is Quietly Piling Up
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Like many states wanting to “re-open” from COVID-19, Florida has been aggressively touting its own “re-opening”. However, as people are flooding into restaurants and other establishments, something else is also growing, which is the COVID-19 body count as the Miami Herald by way of MSN News reports.
Over the past week, elders living in long-term care facilities accounted for seven-in-10 Florida deaths resulting from the coronavirus, as the pandemic increasingly became a scourge of the old and frail.
Though the cumulative overall number of deaths attributed to COVID-19, the illness caused by exposure to the coronavirus, doubled this month, coronavirus deaths at nursing homes and assisted living facilities tripled. As of Saturday, 1,228 people at long-term care facilities had died from COVID-19.
“I don’t know of any place else in the country that matches this,” said Larry Polivka, executive director of the Florida State University-based Claude Pepper Center, of the seven-in-10 figure. He has studied aging and long-term care issues for decades.
“This should raise red flags about our need to know more about what is going on in these nursing homes that are producing these highest-in-the-nation percentages of fatalities, and our need to be really transparent about our efforts to respond to that and reduce the number of deaths, reduce the number of infections and keep nursing homes safe.”
“What steps are we taking, systematically, to contain and reduce this? It is our obligation to do so, because so many of these residents have no choice but to be there,” Polivka said. “They can’t leave. They don’t have an option. If we have any feelings, any sense at all, of obligation, we must protect them as best as we can.
“I’d like to see more evidence that obligation is more widely felt,” Polivka added.
New figures released Friday night by the Florida Department of Health show that, while new outbreaks of the virus are being reported at homes that were previously untouched, deaths continue to mount at facilities that already were hardest hit. (source)
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