Nearly 70 Veterans Found Dead in Long-Term Care Facility in Massachusetts

A U.S. long-term care facility in Massachusetts reported almost 70 deaths due to the coronavirus. The state and federal officials are investigating what went wrong in the deadliest known outbreak at a long-term care facility in the U.S.

Federal officials are looking into the situation in Holyoke Soldiers' Home as its death toll continues to rise. Many believe that the residents were denied proper medical care and the state's top prosecutor is deciding whether to bring legal action. There were 68 veteran residents who have died due to coronavirus, according to the official report on April 28. There are 82 other residents and 81 employees who have tested positive for COVID-19.

Staffing problems

The superintendent of the home defended his response and accused state officials of falsely claiming that they were unaware of the scope of the problem in the facility. The superintendent, Bennett Walsh, has been placed on administrative leave. He stated that the state officials knew that the home was in crisis mode when it came to staffing shortages and were notified early and often about the contagion at the facility.

According to Joan Miller, a nurse at the home, staffing problems have contributed to the spreading of the virus. The staffing was so tight that workers from one unit were constantly moving to others to help out, thus bringing their germs with them. She stated that at one point, a unit was shut down because there was not enough staff to operate it, and the veterans were moved into close quarters in other parts of the building.

The Boston Globe reported that the situation is now contained because there are now few veterans living there. There were around 230 residents living at the facility in late March and only 100 remained, as of April 27.

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Were the residents neglected?

Republican governor Charlie Baker's administration has hired an outside attorney to conduct an investigation into the deaths. The Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, is also investigating to know what went wrong at the facility and to determine if legal action is warranted.

The US attorney's office in Massachusetts and federal justice department's civil rights division are looking into whether the home violated residents' rights by failing to give them proper medical care. The death toll at the home appears to be the largest at a long-term care facility in the United States.

Dr. Michael Wasserman, the president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine said that it is also symbolic of how unprepared many nursing facilities have been. Experts and geriatricians in long-term care medicine were sounding alarms at the beginning of March and they have been ignored by everyone, from the federal, state and local government to the nursing home industry.

There is no official count of nursing home deaths across the country. The federal government has only recently required the nation's more than 15,000 nursing homes to start reporting numbers of confirmed and presumed deaths and infections, but it is not clear yet when the count will be published.

The Associated Press has been compiling its own tally from state health departments and media reports, and they found at least 13,762 deaths from outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities in America.