As the two mortuary workers pushed a stretcher with a bagged corpse out of the room, the elderly man in the adjacent bed briefly awakened from his dementia. “Is he dead” he muttered, extending his arm, trying to touch his roommate for the last time, reports AP.
Reflecting on a scene repeated too many times, one of the workers, Manel Rivera, despaired at the growing number of elderly people dying as the coronavirus resurges.
“The sad thing is,” he said of the surviving man in the Barcelona nursing home, “in a few days we’ll probably come back for him.”
Mortuary workers are again busy around-the-clock in nursing homes and hospices across Europe, amid outbreaks that this time are causing havoc mostly in facilities spared during the spring. In the U.S., patients in nursing homes and long-term care facilities and those who care for them have accounted for a staggering 39% of the country’s 281,000 coronavirus deaths.
The surge in Europe is happening despite the retaining wall of measures erected since the spring, including facilities tailored only for residents with coronavirus. It’s also pitching authorities and elder care professionals into a race against the clock before mass vaccinations can begin.
In response, Portugal has deployed military units to train nursing home staff in disinfection. In France, where at least 5,000 institutionalized elderly have died in the past month, and in Germany and Italy, where the summer respite has been followed by an upward turn since September, visits by relatives to nursing homes are being restricted again or banned altogether.
Most countries are ramping up screening of workers and residents, trying to prevent spread by asymptomatic virus carriers. The strategy has helped Belgium reduce nursing homes deaths from 63% of all COVID-19 fatalities before mid-June to 39% at the end of November.
But in Spain, where the pandemic has ignited a polarized debate on the country’s ability to care for Europe’s fastest-aging society, nursing home coronavirus deaths have been climbing for two months. They now make up roughly half of all new daily fatalities, a similar share as in March and April. New daily infections are also disproportionate in the homes — 13 cases inside for every one outside.
There is reason for hope, however, as Britain became the first country in the world to authorize a rigorously tested COVID-19 vaccine last week, and could begin dispensing it within days, prioritizing nursing home residents and those who care for them, followed by other elderly and health care workers. Nursing homes are also at or near the top of the list for vaccines in the U.S., Spain and many other European countries.
Some things have improved since the spring. Care workers have learned to make the best use of protective equipment and tests, which are no longer in such short supply. There’s a better grasp of what’s going on inside most facilities, and experts have learned how COVID-19 affects the elderly, with symptoms such as diarrhea and rashes that had been overlooked.
One of the gravest mistakes in the early days was to cloister the elderly in damaging isolation, García Navarro said, leading to loss of mobility, insomnia, malnourishment, depression and other ailments that affected and even killed many.
An initiative in Spain is trying to remedy that with facilities for recovering virus patients who, while remaining contagious, have nowhere to isolate or keep active. They come from their own homes or from the many small care facilities that have no way to separate residents. At the Vitalia Canillejas Home in Madrid, Belkis Zoraida Cuevas, 83, is recovering from the virus, which has kept her away from her husband, 92-year-old Joaquín González, for the longest period in more than six decades of marriage.
As he walked with the help of a therapist to recover lost mobility during a month-long hospitalization, 87-year-old Pedro Marcelo said “I’m not afraid of dying, I just want to move a little bit better until the day for me to go arrives.”❐
