Anonymous wrote:Death is still dead, no matter how much you and the auto-trolls that replied twist it for your political views.

What’s your point? That it’s not significant that the risk falls disproportionately on the elderly? Shouldn’t that inform how we react to the virus ?

Anonymous wrote:
Except it IS community spread, and workers there can and do spread the infection outside of their workplace and into the community, including hospitals, other nursing homes, group homes, and prisons... all places with people highly likely to catch it, and perhaps die from it.

No. It’s not. Treat nursing home workers totally differently. You can isolate them until this is over. We need a strong public health response to this. This is NOT the same as general community spread.

Anonymous wrote:Many nursing home workers work 2-3 jobs just to get by.

And the PPE was not prioritized to nursing homes. Those workers are going from job to job without the proper protective gear. Ugh.

Anonymous wrote:What proportion of the very elderly are in nursing homes? What proportion of the most frail are in nursing homes? I would want to see those numbers before making any judgments...

if you assume the people in nursing homes are 70 and older, they would account for 70% of the deaths in MD in that age bracket.

We need higher wages for those who work with the elderly, but also more use of technology and robots.

Except it IS community spread, and workers there can and do spread the infection outside of their workplace and into the community, including hospitals, other nursing homes, group homes, and prisons... all places with people highly likely to catch it, and perhaps die from it.

Death is still dead, no matter how much you and the auto-trolls that replied twist it for your political views.

What proportion of the very elderly are in nursing homes? What proportion of the most frail are in nursing homes? I would want to see those numbers before making any judgments...

Many nursing home workers work 2-3 jobs just to get by.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Hogan resisted releasing this data until now. Why?

Also, the nursing homes say all the supplies have gone to the hospitals, which have seen little surge, rather than them.

We need to demand the resources go to nursing homes. That’s where this pandemic is, by far, the worst.

Need major change on infection control in nursing homes.

The nursing home lobby is disgusting. They lobbied the governor not to release the figures and name nursing homes with cases.

It makes sense.

First, Older people are more likely to die from this disease. So age seems like a strong reason for the deaths in nursing homes.

Additionally, it is difficult to practice any form of social distancing in a huge facility where nurses, cleaners, caretakers, cooks are constantly interacting with several people at the time. Additionally, a lot of employees in nursing homes pick up extra work at different facilities.

I think people will move towards finding much smaller facilities for their elderly loved ones.

Agree with all of this. Very common pattern in every state.

I agree this should be stated more prominently. The risk is to elderly mainly

Maryland just released, for the first time, cases and deaths from COVID in nursing homes. Like I said in the title, 22% of our cases and 50% of our deaths are from nursing homes.

My takeaways:

1. Those places are practically death sentences for old people and need radical changes.

2. We need to exclude those cases and deaths from the numbers as we think about reopening because they are not community spread. We know where they came from and the risk of exposure is to other residents and workers, not the general public. We need a completely different, separate policy response to nursing homes versus the rest of the community.

Outside of nursing homes, Maryland has 15,700 cases—roughly—and about 478 deaths. In MoCo, a county of 1 million people, we have about 2600 cases and 92 deaths outside of nursing homes.

This pandemic looks very different when you exclude nursing homes.

I feel horrible for the people in those places.

All the data is at Coronavirus.maryland.gov.