Interesting question. I can attest to the current disaster in many nursing homes.
My brother-in-law suffered a burst brain aneurysm late January. A large bleed that brought so many complications that he needed 4 surgeries to sort everything out. At the end of his nearly 2 month ICU stint, the hospital began the no visitor rules. From the hospital he was supposed to move to a skilled nursing facility, but again - no visitors allowed. Rather than that, the family opted to bring him home and care for him themselves.
They struggle to get a home care nurse in for 5 hours a day. It seems CNAs are working already, don't want to work for myriad understandable reasons, or are terrified to go from one house to the next. Not that his family is all that keen on an outsider possibly introducing CV to their home.
(Yes, they have a Long Term Care insurance plan, but what a royal pain in the a$$ that's turning out to be. Talk about a thousand hoops to jump through - he's been home for four weeks and they have yet to cross every t and dot every i to the insurance company's satisfaction. Not a single dime paid by them, nor even an assurance that they'll cover this. Wading through their required paperwork is turning out to be a full time job for my SIL. What a nightmare. But that's another post for another thread.)
So his kids and grandkids are going over every day to help with this. They take turns doing the night shift. I'm talking about changing diapers type helping out. They do the OT, PT and speech therapy. They family is the full front line for everything that would have been managed in a SNF, because the family was too terrified to send him to one, given their high rates of CV infections. And it was a wise decision. The SNF they'd lined up had a huge CV outbreak ten days ago. All patients were evacuated and the facility closed.
https://www.pe.com/2020/04/08/river...facility-with-39-coronavirus-cases-evacuated/
My takeaway? I would hobble on a bad knee, suffer with creaky hips, deal with a painful gall bladder, look through filmy cataracts, etc., rather than have
any kind of elective surgery that either needs rehab or could possibly go south and need SNF care.
I'm here to tell you, COVID-19 is a nightmare for hospital and SNF patients, families and staff.
