In California Nursing Homes, Omicron Is Bad, but So Is the Isolation

By Linda Marsa, CaliforniaHealthline, January 28 2022 (Getty Images) Dina Halperin had been cooped up alone for three weeks in her nursing home room after her two unvaccinated roommates were moved out at the onset of the omicron surge. “I’m frustrated,” she said, “and so many of the nursing staff are burned out or just plain tired.” The situation wasn’t terrifying, as it was in September 2020, when disease swept through the Victorian Post Acute facility in San Francisco and Halperin, a 63-year-old former English as a Second Language teacher, became severely ill with covid.

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COVID-infected nurses working at short-staffed nursing homes

By Kristen Hwang, CalMatters, January 24 2022 A sign at The Pines at Placerville Healthcare Center honors its workers. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters About 11,500 long-term care center workers are now sick with COVID. “It’s been like one coworker after another, after another, everyone getting sick,” one nursing assistant said. Four days after Celine started working as a nursing assistant in the COVID-19 unit at a Placerville nursing home, she tested positive for the virus.

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Families Complain as States Require Covid Testing for Nursing Home Visits

By Judith Graham, Kaiser Health News, January 19 2022 A nursing home resident waits for a visitor. (E+ / Getty Images) As covid-19 cases rise again in nursing homes, a few states have begun requiring visitors to present proof that they’re not infected before entering facilities, stoking frustration and dismay among family members. Officials in California, New York, and Rhode Island say new covid testing requirements are necessary to protect residents — an enormously vulnerable population — from exposure to the highly contagious omicron variant.

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California is limiting nursing home visits again amid omicron surge

By Emily DeRuy, Bay Area News Group, January 7 2022 ATHERTON, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 6: Erika Shimahara, of Atherton, Calif., holds a picture of her mother who lives in a Redwood City assisted living facility, Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022. With the state about to tighten visitor restrictions due to the spread the omicron variant, some families are worried about losing access to their loved ones.

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After ‘Truly Appalling’ Death Toll in Nursing Homes, California Rethinks Their Funding

By Samantha Young, CaliforniaHealthline, December 15 2021 Ambulances line up as patients who tested positive for covid-19 leave Magnolia Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Riverside, California, on April 8, 2020. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) SACRAMENTO, Calif. — About 1 in 8 Californians who have died of covid lived in a nursing home.

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From maggots to sex abuse, nursing homes sue California to overturn citations, fines

By Barbara Feder Ostrov, CalMatters, December 6 2021 IN SUMMARY California nursing homes have filed more than 400 lawsuits since 2016 to appeal state citations and fines alleging poor patient care. Regulators downgraded nearly a third of sanctions involving a death. Advocates say the appeals system favors nursing homes. Lea este artículo en español. At a nursing home in Los Angeles last year, a nurse’s aide was giving a resident a bed bath when she noticed something moving around his feeding tube.

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Grieving relatives sue facilities over COVID-19 deaths. Nursing homes say they’re immune

By Emily Alpert Reyes, Los Angeles Times, November 5 2021 Helena Apothaker holds a photograph of her and her mother, Catherine, in West Hollywood. Apothaker is suing Silverado Senior Living after her Catherine died of COVID-19 at a care facility near the Fairfax District. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) Helena Apothaker was raw with grief for her mother, who had died of COVID-19 as the virus swept through a care facility in Beverly Grove, when she heard the news that infuriated her: The facility had admitted a new resident amid the pandemic.

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The Forgotten Nursing-Home Tragedy

Opinion by Jay Caspian Kang, New York Times, November 4 2021 For many of the most vulnerable people in our society, the pandemic has not let up. More than 186,000 residents and staff members of nursing homes and long-term-care facilities have already died of Covid-19. In March, the Covid Tracking Project estimated that nearly 1 in 10 people who lived in nursing homes in the United States had died of the virus.

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Nursing home staffing falls as patients plead for help

By Matt Sedensky, AP News, October 7, 2021 Natalie Walters, 53, holds a photo of her parents, Jack and Joey Walters, near her home in Syracuse, N.Y., Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021. Walters’ father, who was staying at the Loretto Health and Rehabilitation nursing home in Syracuse, died of COVID-19 in December 2020. The facility’s staffing has declined during the pandemic and Walters wonders if poor staffing played a role in her father’s infection or death.

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State health department blasted over nursing home oversight

By Jocelyn Wiener, CalMatters, October 6 2021 At an emotional legislative hearing Tuesday, lawmakers and critics subjected the Newsom administration to blistering questions about the state’s oversight of nursing homes. Assemblymember Jim Wood, a Santa Rosa Democrat who chairs the Assembly Health Committee, questioned the state’s lack of urgency in addressing licensing concerns. “Where is the proactive, patient centered, public safety approach here?” he asked Cassie Dunham, an acting deputy director of the California Department of Public Health.

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