Even as news organizations reported that the coronavirus pandemic has taken a grievous toll on seniors institutionalized with dementia, a presidential panel on nursing home care split over common sense but limp recommendations on how the nation might reduce Covid-19’s savaging of the old, sick, and injured in long-term care facilities.
The unsurprising, 180-plus pages of recommendations from the Coronavirus Commission on Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes to the Trump Administration and specifically its long-term care facility watchdog Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) included calls for: “More money for testing, for personal protective equipment (PPE), for registered nurses, for infection control training and staff salary increases,” the Washington Post reported.
Seema Verma, the CMS chief who has led a calamitous federal response in long-term care that has left at least 77,000 vulnerable residents dead — 40% of all the coronavirus fatalities in the nation — and not quite a half million infected, tried to spin the commission’s findings.
