The coronavirus pandemic has hit at least one in every six of America’s nursing homes — with more than 5,000 residents dying in facilities in New York and New Jersey alone, according to an alarming report.
The number of cases in nursing homes doubled in the past week, with a startling 80 percent of the Garden State’s facilities now reporting cases, according to a database compiled by the Washington Post.
Nationwide, more than 2,700 Medicare-certified facilities had reported cases as of Tuesday, the paper said — noting that the elderly are most at risk from the deadly pandemic.
Even a week ago, the Wall Street Journal said care home deaths had already soared past 10,000.
And the real tally could be even worse, the paper stressed, noting that New York state’s tally only lists homes where there have been at least five deaths.
Laurie Facciarossa Brewer, the long-term care ombudsman in New Jersey, told the paper that homes were unprepared to stop the contagion.
“People who work in nursing homes didn’t have the proper equipment and there wasn’t widespread testing,” she said. “Without those two critical components, you cannot avoid such a devastating outcome.”
It is now “overwhelming” trying to update families in the state because there are so many cases., Brewer added.
“Calls have gone from, ‘I don’t know if my mother has a fever,’ to ‘I don’t know if they’re dead or alive,'” she told the paper.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for his part, has previously said it’s not New York’s job to supply personal protective equipment to nursing homes.