Connecticut’s Coronavirus Wasteland, Suits Ahead?

In “The Wasteland”, T. S. Eliot writes:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land…

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

April 24 fell a month and a few days after Governor Ned Lamont, perhaps in consultation with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, announced on March 20 that many businesses in Connecticut would be shuttered owing to the onset of Coronavirus. To people whose stricken relatives abide in Connecticut nursing homes, that month must seem like an eternity.

On April 24 The Day reported, “According to Gov. Ned Lamont's chief operating officer, Josh Geballe, nursing home residents made up 43% of all COVID-19-related deaths in the state. A report issued by the state [on April 22] indicated that 3,423 of approximately 22,000 nursing home residents in Connecticut were infected with the disease, 568 deaths were confirmed to be related to COVID-19 and another 200 deaths were suspected to be related.”

Nearly half of all COVID-19-related deaths in Connecticut to date occurred in the state’s nursing homes. Who knew, right? Most of us had not thought death had undone so many in nursing homes.

But these death were entirely predictable, even without the April 22 report, because people in state government who are supposed to know such things knew far in advance of the nursing home deaths that Coronavirus  was most lethal to the aged and infirm – i.e. people residing in nursing homes. They also know that they should have been devoting most of their energy and resources to “hot spots” in the state such as Fairfield County, New Haven and Hartford, where ravages from Coronavirus would be most acute.

The Coronavirus infestation is like a forest fire. One would like to think that a government in charge of disbursing fire-fighting equipment and personnel would early on send fire suppressors to the hotspots mentioned above – Fairfield County, New Haven and Hartford – to douse the blaze. Lamont and his media mouthpieces have yet to answer the question why his administration was so anxious to suppress the non-existent blaze in Windham County, while leaving nursing homes throughout Connecticut gutted by Coronavirus.   

What precautions had been taken by Lamont to forestall the many sighs, short and infrequent, exhaled by the relatives of the dead, their eyes fixed before their feet?

The Day story notes: “During Lamont's daily news conference Friday, April 24, members of the statewide media peppered him with questions about nursing home administrators not accurately reporting cases and deaths, lack of testing for nursing home workers, continued reports of personal protective equipment, or PPE, shortages and public health inspections being conducted virtually.”

The Coronavirus blaze in New York was just as bad, if not worse.

The New York Post set the nursing home issue ablaze with this headline: “New York refused to send nursing home’s COVID-19 patients to nearly empty USNS Comfort” and the front page of the paper, not yet a liege lord of Cuomo, blasted  “THEY KNEW!” Here is the lede: “New York health officials were warned in writing that a Brooklyn nursing home where 55 patients have died of coronavirus was overwhelmed — weeks before it began topping the state’s official list of resident COVID-19 deaths, damning emails show.” Suits, one supposes, will soon begin to bloom in Cuomo’s New York. And the same may happen here in Connecticut.

It took Post investigative reporters awhile to force New York’s inattentive government to cough up emails showing that “New York health officials were warned in writing that a Brooklyn nursing home where 55 patients have died of coronavirus was overwhelmed — weeks before it began topping the state’s official list of resident COVID-19 deaths…”

The money quote in the Post story was delivered by Cobble Hill Health Center CEO Donny Tuchman, who had begged state Health Department officials on April 9 to find “’a way for us to send our suspected covid patients’ to the hospital built inside the Javits Convention Center or the US Naval hospital ship Comfort.” Tuchman’s request was denied. “’I was told those facilities were only for hospitals” to send their overflow patients, Tuchman said.” The paper noted, “At the time Tuchman sent his plea, only 134 of the 1,000 beds at the Javits Center were full and the Comfort — [a medical vessel that ] had just been reconfigured to treat up to 500 COVID-19 patients — had a mere 62 on board... Adding insult to injury, the Navy hospital ship [sent to New York by Trump] wound up treating just 179 patients before Gov. Cuomo on Tuesday said it was no longer needed.”

It’s only a matter of time before Connecticut investigative reporters take note that Lamont has tied his Coronavirus combat kite to Cuomo’s. Even now, relatives of the Coronavirus RELATED dead in Connecticut nursing homes may be pawing the business yellow pages in search of lawyers. Inattention of this kind could be very costly to a state swimming in a cesspool of debt.