During the COVID-19 pandemic, people in care homes have been dying in droves.
Why is this happening? Is it simply because older adults are very vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 and therefore it’s not unexpected that many would succumb?
Or do care homes deserve the lion’s share of the blame, such as by paying so poorly that many workers have to split their time between several facilities, spreading the virus in the process?
Alternatively, could medical experts and government bureaucrats, with the full knowledge of at least the top tier of government officials, have created conditions shortly after the pandemic struck that contribute to the high death tolls while engendering virtually no public backlash against themselves?
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This article shows that the third hypothesis is highly plausible. The people who created the conditions may be unaware of, or oblivious to, their implications. But it’s also possible that at least some of them know exactly what they’re doing.
After all – seeing it from an amoral government’s point of view – the growing numbers of elderly are a big burden on today’s fiscally strained governments, because in aggregate they’re paying much less into the tax base than younger people while causing the costs of healthcare and retirement programs to skyrocket.
Here are three sets of conditions that collectively create a framework for enabling significantly boosted care-home deaths – and doing so with impunity – even while most of each set of conditions in isolation may appear to be purely for the benefit of everyone in society:
One. Bureaucrats develop extremely broad definitions of novel-coronavirus infections and outbreaks. This is coupled with the continuing presence, in a number of care homes scattered across each jurisdiction, of at least one nurse or physician who follows every letter of all definitions and rules. (Such individuals are always present in every discipline, but in the medical milieu their actions can be deliberate, deadly and very hard to detect.)
Two. Influential organizations and individuals produce hospital-care-rationing guidelines that recommend younger people receive higher priority than the elderly during the pandemic, by giving significant weight to how many years of life patients would have ahead of them if treatment is successful. Also, some guidelines bar care-home residents from being transferred to hospital.
Three. The chief coroner and leaders of the funeral, cremation and burial industries craft procedures that fundamentally change the way care-home deaths are documented and bodies dealt with. Their stated goal is to prevent overburdening of medical staff and body-storage areas during a surge in COVID-19 deaths.
They also put them into effect very quickly with no notice to the public; this gives those directly affected very limited opportunity for input or push-back.
Among the many radical changes is death certificates are no longer completed by people who care for care-home residents; instead, they are filled in by the chief coroner’s office.
Also, examination of the undisturbed death scene is prevented, as are all but a very few post-mortems and other sober second looks at the cause and mode of death.
In the background are the complicit ranks of public-health organizations, politicians, media and many other influential individuals. When the pandemic first strikes they focus on how new, dangerous and poorly understood the virus is. As one side effect, this scares many care-home staff so much they flee in fear, leaving their overwhelmed colleagues to cope.
After a short time, they also start to distract the public and victims’ loved ones from uncovering the three sets of conditions by focusing on other factors in the rash of deaths among institutionalized elderly – and by insisting the solution to everything is more testing and contact tracing, along with accelerated vaccine and anti-viral development.
This article shows how the three sets of conditions were put in place in Ontario, Canada.
Variations on these conditions very likely have been crafted in other jurisdictions in North America, Europe and elsewhere. An exclusive interview with the daughter of one of the dozens of people who died during an outbreak at an Ontario care home illustrates how the three sets of conditions work in practice.
CONDITION SET ONE: BROAD DEFINITIONS OF NOVEL-CORONAVIRUS INFECTIONS AND OUTBREAKS
At the start of the novel-coronavirus epidemic in Ontario, formal definitions of infections and care-home-outbreaks weren’t issued, at least not publicly.
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Rather, in late March Chief Medical Officer of Health for Ontario, Dr. David Williams, and the Associate Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Barbara Yaffe, described the criteria verbally during their daily press briefings.
An outbreak should be declared when two or three people show symptoms of infection with the novel coronavirus, they said.
Also, polymerase chain reaction testing for viral RNA wasn’t required for confirmation.
This is a loosened version of criteria used in the province prior to the novel-coronavirus epidemic. These previous criteria defined an outbreak as either: two people in the same area of a facility developing symptoms within two days of each other (making their infections ‘epidemiologically linked’) and at least one of them testing positive for viral RNA; or three people in the same area developing symptoms within two days of each other.
On March 30 the Ontario health ministry released new rules for defining and managing care-home outbreaks (with the document confusingly dated April 1). Staff at all Ontario care nursing homes were trained on the new rules via webinars two days later, on April 1.
The new rules included an even broader outbreak definition: the presence of only one person with just one symptom of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Outbreaks were deemed confirmed when just one resident or staff member tested positive; subsequently, every resident in the care home showing any coronavirus-infection symptoms is deemed to have COVID-19.
