Last week, I wrote about the logistical difficulties of a strategy to “isolate the vulnerable” so that everybody else can get back to normal. In few places is this more difficult than in nursing homes, which remain at the center of the coronavirus pandemic.
Nursing homes have been a major source of outbreaks and deaths across the United States. Not only are residents of nursing homes more susceptible to developing more severe cases of COVID-19, but the nature of the facilities invites more spread. Residents often share rooms, interact in common areas, and eat meals communally. Because they often need assistance with daily activities, there is a lot of close and sustained physical contact between them and their caregivers.
In total, there have been nearly 28,000 residents or workers who have died from the coronavrius at nursing homes or other long-term care facilities, according to the New York Times database, and about 150,000 people have been infected. In 15 states, more than half of the deaths from COVID-19 were linked to some sort of adult care community.
Clearly, any approach to limiting the number of hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus would have to involve a serious effort to tackle the uncontrolled spread at nursing homes.
Over at the City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Pope explores an interesting idea currently showing success at a nursing home in Connecticut: paying huge bonuses for workers to live in the facility. Doing so limits the amount of exposure to the outside world that workers would be bringing inside the facility — and to the germs that they’d be bringing from within the facility when they commute home.
Pope explains:
“According to its owner, Tyson Belanger, the key is to pay enough to motivate staff to work overtime (a 60- to 80-hour work week) and justify leaving their families for an extended period. In practice, this has required roughly tripling staff salary for a few months. Staff are housed in campers parked on-site, and unoccupied rooms, nearby rental houses, or hotel rooms might also be put to use. Management has taken precautions to segment the facility, so that if someone does get infected, transmission can be limited. Some staff and rooms are set aside for quarantining residents who will inevitably break the bubble to go to the hospital for unrelated issues. Similar approaches have been tried with success in Georgia, Ohio, and Southern France.”
He estimates that scaling up the idea nationally would require $5 billion in federal subsidies. While in normal times that’s a major expenditure, in the context of $2.9 trillion in spending bills that have been passed to respond to the coronavirus, it would be a relative bargain if it actually proved effective at significantly reducing the toll in one of the hardest-hit places.
It’s possible, of course, that once there is an outbreak at a facility, it’s too late for such an approach to prove effective. But at the minimum, it seems this is an idea worthy of consideration and debate.
