The national data has shown that nursing home and assisted living residents are most at-risk from COVID-19 and yet Whitmer’s administration shamefully did not prioritize their safety.
June 18, 2020
Gov. Whitmer Doubles Down After Scalise Letter Claiming State Ignored COVID-19 Nursing Home Protocols
Governor Gretchen Whitmer is defending her policy of placing COVID-19 patients in nursing homes with healthy residents after receiving a letter from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Ranking Member, Congressman Steve Scalise. The letter reads in part:
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected the elderly, especially those living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. We write to you seeking information, at a granular level, about the science and information used to inform your decision to mandate nursing homes and long-term care facilities admit untested and contagious COVID-19 patients from hospitals. This decision likely contributed to the thousands of elderly deaths in Michigan.
The letter from Scalise and other members of the committee requests documents and data from Whitmer’s administration and a staff-level briefing no later than June 18.
NBC 25 News reported on Monday that they reached out to Whitmer for comment on the letter but hadn’t heard back.
After Whitmer’s administration failed to make the data public for months, it’s now clear that nursing homes were catastrophic for Michigan’s most vulnerable residents, accounting for over 1,900 deaths with potentially many more unreported since the state has not tracked other long-term care facilities that house seniors and the disabled.
Since early May, when WXYZ reported that a Sterling Heights nursing home suffered a spike in coronavirus cases after being forced to accept dozens of positive patients, state lawmakers in both parties have been demanding that Whitmer rescind her policy.
It’s clear by Whitmer’s delay in releasing data and improving policies to protect residents in nursing homes and assisted living that her focus has been on national politics and not the crisis impacting Michigan’s most vulnerable. The national data has shown that nursing home and assisted living residents are most at-risk from COVID-19 and yet Whitmer’s administration shamefully did not prioritize their safety. – Tori Sachs, executive director of Michigan Rising Action.