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Reopening of Long-Term Care Facilities Is ‘an Absolute Necessity for Our Well-Being’
For nearly a year, nursing homes and assisted living centers have been mostly closed to visitors. Now, it’s time for them to open back up and relieve residents of crushing isolation, according to a growing chorus of long-term care experts, caregivers, consumer groups and physicians. This story also ran on CNN. It can be republished for free. They’re calling for federal health authorities to relax visitation restrictions in long-term care institutions, replacing guidance that’s been in place since September. And they want both federal and state authorities to grant special status to “essential ...
Kaiser Health News
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Reopening of Long-Term Care Facilities Is ‘an Absolute Necessity for Our Well-Being’
For nearly a year, nursing homes and assisted living centers have been mostly closed to visitors. Now, it’s time for them to open back up and relieve residents of crushing isolation, according to a growing chorus of long-term care experts, caregivers, consumer groups and physicians. This story also ran on CNN. It can be republished for free. They’re calling for federal health authorities to relax visitation restrictions in long-term care institutions, replacing guidance that’s been in place since September. And they want both federal and state authorities to grant special status to “essential ...
California Healthline
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Sorting Out How Politics, Policies Figure in Flap Over New York Nursing Home Covid Death Rates
The plaudits have faded for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Once hailed as a paragon of pandemic governing, he’s since come under scorching criticism for undercounting the state’s covid deaths among nursing home residents by as much as half. The tallying flap drew attention to another misstep: a policy last March that directed nursing homes to accept covid-positive patients from hospitals, potentially exposing high-risk, medically vulnerable nursing home residents to the deadly virus. Did the governor intentionally fudge nursing home death counts to deflect attention from the impact of an ill-advi...
Kaiser Health News
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Sorting Out How Politics, Policies Figure in Flap Over New York Nursing Home Covid Death Rates
The plaudits have faded for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Once hailed as a paragon of pandemic governing, he’s since come under scorching criticism for undercounting the state’s covid deaths among nursing home residents by as much as half. The tallying flap drew attention to another misstep: a policy last March that directed nursing homes to accept covid-positive patients from hospitals, potentially exposing high-risk, medically vulnerable nursing home residents to the deadly virus. Did the governor intentionally fudge nursing home death counts to deflect attention from the impact of an ill-advi...
California Healthline
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Connecticut Is Doling Out Vaccines Based Strictly on Age. It’s Simpler, but Is it Fair?
With covid vaccines expected to remain scarce into early spring, Connecticut has scrapped its complicated plans to prioritize immunizations for people under 65 with certain chronic conditions and front-line workers. Instead, the state will primarily base eligibility on age. Gov. Ned Lamont pointed to statistics showing the risk of death and hospitalization from covid-19 rises significantly by age. Yet, shifting to an age-based priority system — after health workers, nursing home patients and people 65 and up have been offered vaccines — has frustrated people with health conditions such as canc...
Kaiser Health News
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Connecticut Is Doling Out Vaccines Based Strictly on Age. It’s Simpler, but Is it Fair?
With covid vaccines expected to remain scarce into early spring, Connecticut has scrapped its complicated plans to prioritize immunizations for people under 65 with certain chronic conditions and front-line workers. Instead, the state will primarily base eligibility on age. Gov. Ned Lamont pointed to statistics showing the risk of death and hospitalization from covid-19 rises significantly by age. Yet, shifting to an age-based priority system — after health workers, nursing home patients and people 65 and up have been offered vaccines — has frustrated people with health conditions such as canc...
California Healthline
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Countless Homebound Patients Still Wait for Covid Vaccine Despite Seniors’ Priority
This story also ran on CNN. It can be republished for free. Opening another front in the nation’s response to the pandemic, medical centers and other health organizations have begun sending doctors and nurses to apartment buildings and private homes to vaccinate homebound seniors. Boston Medical Center, which runs the oldest in-home medical service in the country, started doing this Feb. 1. Wake Forest Baptist Health, a North Carolina health system, followed a week later. In Miami Beach, Florida, fire department paramedics are delivering vaccines to frail seniors in their own homes. In East St...
Kaiser Health News
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Countless Homebound Patients Still Wait for Covid Vaccine Despite Seniors’ Priority
This story also ran on CNN. It can be republished for free. Opening another front in the nation’s response to the pandemic, medical centers and other health organizations have begun sending doctors and nurses to apartment buildings and private homes to vaccinate homebound seniors. Boston Medical Center, which runs the oldest in-home medical service in the country, started doing this Feb. 1. Wake Forest Baptist Health, a North Carolina health system, followed a week later. In Miami Beach, Florida, fire department paramedics are delivering vaccines to frail seniors in their own homes. In East St...
California Healthline
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Companies Pan for Marketing Gold in Vaccines
This story also ran on NBC News. It can be republished for free. For a decade, Jennifer Crow has taken care of her elderly parents, who have multiple sclerosis. After her father had a stroke in December, the family got serious in its conversations with a retirement community — and learned that one service it offered was covid-19 vaccination. “They mentioned it like it was an amenity, like ‘We have a swimming pool and a vaccination program,’” said Crow, a librarian in southern Maryland. “It was definitely appealing to me.” Vaccines, she felt, would help ease her concerns about whether a congreg...
Kaiser Health News
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California Aims to Address the ‘Urgent’ Needs of Older Residents. But Will Its Plan Work?
This story also ran on U.S. News & World Report. It can be republished for free. Even as the pandemic derailed some of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s biggest health care proposals, such as lowering prescription drug costs, it crystallized another: the pressing need to address California’s rapidly aging population. Already nine months into their work when Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order last March, members of a state task force on aging watched as the coronavirus disproportionately sickened and killed older people, and left many isolated in nursing homes, assisted living faci...
Kaiser Health News
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