Nursing home neglect deaths up in COVID shadow

Dawn Best fought hard to get her mother into the Gurwin Jewish Nursing Home on New York's Long Island, because of the facility's great reputation. And at 83, retired telephone switchboard operator Carolyn Best was happy and thriving. "My mother was doing great," Dawn Best says. "We were thrilled."

But when the state began moving COVID-19 patients into Gurwin last March, family access was cut off. Best says everything changed. "And within three weeks of the COVID patients being forced into her nursing home, she was dead," she says. Records show Carolyn Best was dehydrated.

"She did not die a natural death," Dawn Best says. "She did not get the COVID. … The nursing home was overwhelmed."

The coronavirus pandemic has hit older adults especially hard. More than 90,000 of America's long-term care residents have succumbed to the disease. But experts say short staffing, made worse by the pandemic, and the inability of relatives to check on their loved ones have led to a second, less visible wave of death.

"Nursing homes are staffed, in the best of circumstances, to provide routine services to the people who live there," says H. Stephen Kaye, a professor at the Institute on Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. "And so along comes a pandemic, and there's no reserve capacity."

In a study conducted for The Associated Press, Kaye found more than 40,000 so-called "excess deaths" in long-term care facilities since March. He says that for every two COVID-19 victims in long-term care, another died prematurely of other causes. Some death certificates cite simply a "failure to thrive." Resident advocate Lori Smetanka says residents cut off from family and each other are lonely and anxious.

"And it's causing a lot of them to talk about losing the will to live," says Smetanka, of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care. "Not wanting to go on anymore being separated from their families. So, that's taken just as much of a toll as COVID has on residents."

Smetanka and others have been flooded with reports of alleged neglect, of residents left to deteriorate in their rooms. Barbara Leak-Watkins says if there's anything her father learned in the Army, it was to drink lots and lots of fluid. "He always taught my sisters and I when it comes to hydrating yourself," the Greensboro, North Carolina, woman said of Alex Leak Jr. "And he loved water."

So, when Leak collapsed in his room at the Brookdale Northwest assisted living facility in mid-July, his daughter found the doctor's assessment confusing. "He said, 'It looks like your dad is going into kidney failure because of dehydration and laying on the floor, looks like,' he said, 'for HOURS,'" she says. Leak died a month later. He was 87.

Brookdale Senior Living said it couldn't comment on individual cases, but that "the health, happiness and wellbeing of each of our residents will always be our priority." David Gifford, chief medical officer for the American Health Care Association says staffing hours have actually increased during the pandemic. He called Kaye's findings "speculation."

"There have been some really sad and disturbing stories that have come out," he says. "But we have not seen that widespread."

Gurwin said only that its staff made "heroic" efforts to care for residents, at great risk to themselves and their families. Dawn Best says she doesn't blame the nursing home staff. She does blame politicians and public officials who didn't take the pandemic seriously. "It is not political," she says. "This is as personal as you get to us. You killed our parents." She thinks society failed her mother. "She didn't deserve to die this way," she says. "She deserved to be taken care of."