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| Lamont, Blumenthal masked |
A tardy report from Mathematica, a New Jersey research firm, provides a definitive answer to the question: Who is responsible for Coronavirus nursing home deaths in Connecticut, President Donald Trump or Governor Ned Lamont and an inattentive Democrat dominated General Assembly?
The answer to the general question is – Lamont and company,
according to a story that covers the Mathematica report in a Hartford paper
titled “Report:
Nursing home experts neglected.”
The negligence on the part of state government cannot be overstated.
Nursing homes were the charnel houses of Coronavirus. The story notes, “More
than 3,000 nursing home residents — about 70% of the state’s death total from
coronavirus — were claimed by the deadly virus.”
The story cited above provided a soft landing for Lamont and
others in the state General Assembly who were, they would like us to believe, sidelined
by Coronavirus. In fact, Lamont was the only participant in Connecticut's tripartite government; the other two branches of Connecticut’s government, judicial and
legislative, were sidelined by choice.
So focused were Connecticut officials on hospitals, the
story’s lede announces, “that they neglected suggestions and guidance from the
nursing home industry in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.” In case
anyone thinks negligent Connecticut officials may be sued for criminal negligence
by family members who watched their loved ones carted off to unattended funerals
because politicians were asleep at their switches, it should be understood that
the somnolent Democrat dominated legislature has extended to political officials
a courtesy – freedom from suit – that the state is now prepared to withdraw from
Connecticut police officers.
The Mathematica report notes: “Some family members were
left without information about their loved ones, often going days without a
returned phone call from a facility. Despite these issues, the state granted
the LTC industry immunity from liability, which removed a critical mechanism
for holding facilities accountable for negligence.”
Lamont shucks off his negligence this way: “We really looked
at the hospitals very early on just given nature of spread (sic), what we saw
going on in Italy and some other places where hospitals were overwhelmed,”
Lamont said. “We worked hand and glove with hospitals to make sure we had a
coordinated response but I don’t think that was at the expense of the nursing
homes.”
Sorry, but the figures cited in the Mathematica report
confirm that the criminal inattention of Lamont, sidelined General Assembly and
courts in Connecticut, made Connecticut nursing homes into death chambers for
that part of the population most susceptible to Coronavirus lethality. Yet the
death count during the same period among children in Connecticut’s K to
9th grade schools, all ordered closed by the governor, was close to zero.
The governor's plenipotentiary authority, approaching that
of Caesar's during the Roman imperium, has now been extended for five
additional months by a handful of legislators – not the whole General Assembly,
which has not assembled for half a year.
And who seriously believes that death figures from Italy
bore more weight in decisions made by Lamont than the too-clever-by-half media
releases issued by the governors of New York and New Jersey, whose approach to
Coronavirus Lamont had pilfered and plagiarized? It may be possible to congratulate New York Governor Mario Cuomo because death figures in his nursing
homes were a scotch less than those in Lamont’s charnel houses.
So, Lamont’s over attentiveness to hospitals and his
inattention to nursing homes was “not at the expense of nursing homes?” Really?
Dear, dear – where is the empathy? Where are the tears shed publicly for the
relatives and friends of the dead who were prevented by governmental edict from
attending last rites in closed churches?
Politics is the art of making sound decisions that advance
the welfare of the whole polis. But the art of politics in the age of
Coronavirus is devoted almost wholly to the political survival of self-serving incumbent
politicians.
The first principle of post-modern progressive government is: never
apologize, even when your idiot decisions lead to massive deaths. Buried in the
Mathematica report are two important recommendations: 1) “The state” be it
noted, NOT the federal government – “should continue its work to procure
and distribute personal protective equipment to long-term care
facilities as needed,” and 2 “The state should work with facilities to make a
concerted effort to allow residents and loved ones to safely visit and
to provide family members with accurate and timely information on residents’
health and well-being. (emphasis original in report)”
Why should loved ones play a significant curative role in the
medical care of their relatives? Answer: because love is more attentive to the
ill, the poor, and the oppressed than self-serving politicians, and loving eyes
on a sick relative may correct decisions made impersonally by doctors and care
givers. Doctors and care givers animated by loving concern would be the first
to second this proposition. But gubernatorial edicts issued by Lamont in the absence
of legislative and judicial oversight passed over them like an angel of death. Everyone
knows that these two principles should have been observed at the outset of the
pandemic.
Politicians who view the world upside down keep saying that the
economy cannot be opened until Coronavirus is dead. The truth is that
Coronavirus cannot be killed by a suppressed economy, but only by responsible,
wide-awake politicians – and no constructive political movement is possible
while representative government remains stretched out on a coroner’s slab.
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