Memorial Day is intended to honor those in the military who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Many of those men and women gave their lives to keep their comrades alive.
The story I present here reflects that latter type of sacrifice.
As you are probably well aware, the largest tranche of deaths in this pandemic has occurred in senior care facilities. In the state of Connecticut, for example, there have been over 1,600 deaths among residents of those facilities—the majority of the death toll in the state.
But there is at least one facility, Shady Oaks Assisted Living in Bristol, that has not only had no deaths, but no infections at all.
How did this happen?
As this story notes, after the owner, Tyson Belanger, realized that the disease could be spread asymptomatically, he took drastic measures (fortunately, the disease had not established a foothold in his facility before that happened). Namely, he reduced the staff to the bare minimum, and brought in RVs for he and the other remaining staffers; they are now cloistered in the facility along with their residents.
Because he has asked his staffers to remain in quarantine on site, Belanger is paying his remaining caregivers (about 25 percent of the normal staff) well above the normal rates: $15,000 to $20,000 per month. He is drawing from his personal savings to do this, and using money from the Paycheck Protection Program to pay the remaining staffers who have been furloughed.
Although he says he’s still a couple hundred thousand dollars short from the extra expenses of RVs and pay bonuses, he has “no regrets” for doing all he could to save lives within Shady Oaks Assisted Living. . . .
The human reward outweighs the financial uncertainty, he says. Nurse Brouker agrees.
The upside is being a part of a movement “to show that it can be done by bubbling up and all working together as a close team and protecting our elderly,” she says.
And Belanger is no stranger to the notion of sacrifice: after graduating from Yale, he joined the Marines, and served three tours of duty in Iraq, according to an op-ed he wrote in The New York Times a few weeks ago.
The home is now my life, and that means I am consumed with one thing: trying to protect our elderly residents — and the people who care for them — from Covid-19. As is the case with so many homes for the elderly across the country, it is a battle we are not yet winning.
Belanger’s tactics have merit, and I hope, as he proposes, that it can be funded and reproduced wherever feasible.
