2020_06_Blues_Final_Reduced

health
Jersey Department of Health.
In Bergen County, the death toll hit
69 at the New Jersey Veterans Home in
Paramus, where workers complained
they were told to avoid using face masks
because it would scare the residents. The
administrator there later resigned.
At least three-quarters of the more
than 600 facilities where the elderly live
in a group setting eventually reported at
least one Covid-19 case. To date, deaths
in such facilities account for nearly half
of the state’s total. These facilities are licensed
by the state Department of Health
and are subject to surprise inspections
nearly annually that last three to four
days. In addition, a facility can be visited
by the ombudsman’s staff in response to
a complaint.
Nursing homes and assisted-living
centers can’t be hermetically sealed like
some futuristic biodome. Staffers come and
go, vendors make deliveries, relatives and
friends drop by for a visit. In the pandemic,
all posed a risk to the residents inside.
“The virus didn’t come in on an airplane.
It came in, whether from a worker
or a family member,” says state Senator
Joe Vitale (D-Middlesex). Vitale, chairman
of the Health, Human Services and
Senior Citizens committee, authored a
bill signed into law last summer mandating
that long-term care facilities have a
response plan for outbreaks.
Some of the facilities posting the most
deaths had shaky safety records before
the pandemic, as indicated by nursing
home data at medicare.gov. Andover
Subacute and Rehabilitation Center had
a one-star rating from Medicare.
“They were giving out masks to everyone
when this first all started, then they
stopped handing them out,” a nursingcare
specialist told New Jersey Monthly
in an e-mail exchange. The woman, who
preferred to remain anonymous, works
at the Andover facility on an as-needed
basis. She and others resorted to bringing
their own N95 masks from home. On her
shifts, she saw some staff using no personal
protection equipment (PPE) at all,
while others were appropriately wearing
masks, gloves and hair coverings.
Yet to assume such weaknesses alone
explain the deaths in congregate care
misses the point: Covid-19 could bring even
a respected, five-star facility to its knees.
The distress signal from the Catholic order
operating St. Joseph’s Home for Seniors
in Woodbridge came in mid-March, when
staff illnesses and quarantines left all the
care to just three nuns. The state swept in
to evacuate the residents, with six buses
taking them to a facility in Morris County.
Vitale remembers a conversation he
had with Judith Persichilli, the state’s
health commissioner, who began her long
career in health administration as a nurse.
“She said, ‘Joe, if I can’t get staff people
“They were giving out masks to everyone
when this first all started, then
they stopped handing them out.”
up there, I will put on a gown and go
up there myself,’” he recalls. “And she
would’ve.”
The day St. Joseph’s was evacuated,
Fran Groesbeck’s sick mother was the
only resident transported to a hospital.
At one point during her 32-day stay at the
hospital—Raritan Bay Medical Center
in Perth Amboy—her family was told
she probably wasn’t going to make it. In
a FaceTime call, they asked for her final
wish. Her immediate response: “That St.
Joseph’s can reopen.”
Out of gratitude for the care their
mother received at St. Joseph’s, the
family set up a GoFundMe page for the
home. “The love these sisters show, it’s
unconditional,” Groesbeck says. “Their
responsiveness was incredible.” (Luckily,
Groesbeck’s mother survived.)
Despite their best efforts, the virus, with
its diabolical ability to use asymptomatic
individuals to infect others, exposed a key
gap in the fortifications against it: Staffing.
All the masks in the world won’t help if you
don’t have enough workers.
What lessons have been learned to
counter that? What innovations worked?
At the virus’s peak in Bergen County,
the Actors Fund Home in Englewood had
nearly a third of its staff either out sick or
quarantined for exposure. Administrator
Jordan Strohl’s solution was to throw
money at the problem.
Healthy employees were offered a
SOMBER DUTY
Staff at Andover
Subacute and Rehabilitation
Center
prepare to transport
a deceased resident
after Covid-19 swept
through the Sussex
County facility. An
overnight inspection
on Easter weekend
revealed 17 bodies in
a makeshift morgue.
$50-a-day bonus just
for coming to work. Pull
a second shift? That’s
another bonus. Choose
to work in one of the
“hot zones” set up for
Covid-19 patients? See
even more money in
your paycheck.
PHOTOGRAPHS: EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/GETTY IMAGES
36 JUNE 2020 NJMONTHLY.COM