Nursing homes residents over age 80 are by far the group most vulnerable to dying from COVID-19. According to a recent article in the New York Times, one third of all United States corona virus deaths are nursing home patients, and in a dozen states more than half of the fatalities have been nursing home or long-term care facility residents. New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been criticized for ordering nursing homes to accept COVID-19-positive patients, an order that caused the virus to spread like wildfire through nursing home populations and led to thousands of deaths.
Pennsylvania made the same call. Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, who was born male—Richard Levine—and transitioned to living as a female, issued a guidance instructing nursing care facilities to readmit patients who had been treated for the coronavirus and were in “stable” condition (but not testing negative). As in New York, this fatal directive was motivated by the supposed need to free up hospital beds and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by an influx of virus patients, an anticipated tidal wave that never reached the shore.
The guidance stated:
Nursing care facilities must continue to accept new admissions and receive re-admissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital who are stable to alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings. This may include stable patients who have had the COVID-19 virus.
As a result of this order Pennsylvania nursing homes were ravaged by the virus; over two-thirds of the state’s coronavirus deaths were at nursing homes or long-term care facilities. As of May 13, nearly 70 percent of the Pennsylvania’s coronavirus fatalities, 2,611 of 3,806, were in long-term care.
It was recently learned that “Rachel” Levine pursued an opposite course of action with her own mother: “Rachel” removed her 95-year-old mother from a long-term care facility and placed her in a hotel.
When asked about this flagrant hypocrisy, “Rachel” responded with a technical deflection about licensing purview and then asserted that his 95 year-old-mother was making her own residency choices:
Q: “We’re hearing you moved your mother from a nursing home to a hotel. What message does that send to the thousands of Pennsylvanians whose parents are in nursing homes but maybe are unable to move them out . . . when the person in charge moves out their own parent.”
A: “Well my mother is actually a resident of a personal care home — not a nursing home and that is regulated by the Department of Human Services, not the Department of Health. My mother requested — and my sister and I as her children complied —to move her to another location during the COVID-19 outbreak. My mother is 95 years old. She is very intelligent and more than competent to make her own decisions.”
The reader can judge the credibility of that response based upon common sense. 95-year-olds in long-term care very seldom make their own decisions about care. Those decisions are made by spouses or, more often, by middle aged children. It seems obvious that “Rachel” Levine well understood the danger created by her orders regarding long-term care facilities and moved quickly to shield her own mother from them. As with those senators who sold their stocks after receiving classified briefings about the epidemic, there is one standard for the ruled and a quite different one for the rulers.
But “Rachel” Levine has been shielded from criticism by the fact that she is the first transgendered “woman” in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial cabinet, and hence is a celebrity. By the lights of our ruling class, negative comments about LGBTQ are racism and bigotry,
Lest we be accused of only calling out LGBTQ hypocrisy, we should relate the story of Neil Ferguson, whose wildly inaccurate computer model [written in 1950s computer language Fortran(!)] predicted 2.2 million deaths in the US and half a million in the UK—projections that led Drs. Fauci and Birx to call for shutdowns that have caused an economic depression of a severity not seen since the 1930s. During the “shelter in place” regime in Great Britain, Ferguson’s girlfriend (who was married to another) came over to his house for an adulterous liaison. Twice. Ferguson resigned from a governmental advisory committee on which he was serving.
But there have been no consequences for “Rachel.” To the contrary, her boss, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, says she is doing a “phenomenal job.”