Every 3rd person who died from Corona lived in an old people's and nursing home
It is not my job to insult politicians or to say, "I told you so" in view of the deaths of more than a thousand in nursing homes.
Nevertheless, it must be shown here how ineffective the authorities responsible were for the real problems that the 2020 Covid-19 crisis posed for the care industry.
On September 4th, 2020 I wrote a letter to the Bavarian Health Minister Dr. med. Melanie Huml and the Association of the Care Industry in Bavaria. I took the liberty of sending a copy to the Federal Ministry of Health. So far, I have not received a reply to any letter.
I want to quote from the letter here:
"... in view of the special situation of nursing homes and assisted living facilities, I take the liberty of asking the following questions and comments.
1. The care industry, which serves inpatient facilities including assisted living, largely does not believe in the effectiveness of the regulations that apply in April, May and into June, i.e. relatives are prevented from visiting the care wards.
This doubt can be illustrated very easily with an example: in a nursing home or in assisted living, one, a maximum of 2, and in extremely rare cases 3 people will regularly live in a room. A visitor will not hang around with many people, but regularly go directly to the desired person and spend a longer time with them, which is known to be particularly important for the well-being of the person to be cared for in the context of social inclusion.
We therefore assume that the problem does not come from the visitors, who come into contact with only a few or even only one person, but actually from the nursing staff.
In the case of nursing staff, the situation is initially such that, due to the normal accounting key, between 11 and 14 people are regularly served by one nurse in one shift.
So there are contacts from one force to at least up to 14 people, so that a chain of transmission through a single person can have a factor of 14. The contact times are also long enough to allow transmission.
We also see a problem in the fact that the nursing staff is regularly relatively young, between 17 and 35 years old, and is therefore exposed to strong private contacts, both in the family, children, etc., and also privately. Older people, who make up the vast majority of visitors to a nursing home, have an already somewhat more restricted contact area outside.
From a statistical point of view, we can already understand this from the numbers that have reached us from England; the unusual spike in mortality comes from the so-called stately homes, regularly old buildings inherited from the country, in which the country has housed old people's homes due to the local inheritance law. The transmission routes in these stately homes were known and it was found in the summer that 1/3 of all seniors who were in the wave in April and May through Europe
ng, in England in these stately homes was infected and died.
2. Overall, we do not share the opinion of the Minister of Health, Dr. Spahn that the 1st wave was broken by the lockdown and therefore a 2nd wave is not to be expected.
We can say with a probability bordering on certainty that, in a flu-like manner, it was a combination of lockdown and the rising temperatures, which made infection almost impossible.
It should also be noted that the incidence did not fall to 0, but that a slight transmission remained.
We hope, of course, that the minister is right and that a second lockdown is not necessary because a second wave is not yet taking place.
Nonetheless, we hope not to make an apology if we ask you to work out emergency measures, as in the event of a second wave, the elderly in nursing homes and assisted living can be better protected. In an online conference in the 1st week of September, a health department employee announced that his proposal for containment would be to reduce the key to 2 people per caregiver. He could not and did not want to answer the questions about the economic viability of such an undertaking and the general quantitative possibility, i.e. the question of where one should get six times more nursing staff from.
3. Outpatient care
There are similar problems in outpatient care. Although we do not see the problem as serious as in the nursing homes, since outpatient care at home regularly happens to people who are still in better health, the fact that outpatient care takes place shows that a person is no longer fully involved full mobility, thus also a full immune system is equipped.
Typically, a nurse in Munich visits between 7 and 13 people at home per shift. In this case, what has been said above works, only a patient-to-patient transfer is only possible indirectly, not directly. We therefore ask you to set up clear guidelines on how to proceed in this case with a second wave.
In order to illustrate the urgency of the situation, I would like to point out the following: the only known measure is the temperature measurement of nurses once a week and the privileged Corona quick test, which is only delayed and often false negative.
It was communicated that it is planned to also monitor the caregivers, but with what result: Should the care be interrupted if a caregiver has over 37.5 ° or what needs to be done? Do we really want to leave the caregivers alone when they are most in need of help?
Another problem is the almost 80 percent implementation of women in all German nursing staff. Nursing is a female dominated industry. Basically, we have female employees on vacation for 3 days every month
Send leave, presumably paid, when their ovulation-induced body temperature rises above 37.3 °. The problem is that a woman during the period who is also infected with Covid-19 will not necessarily have a further increased temperature of 38 ° etc. It is therefore necessary either to send women home or to let them work and thus not fully comply with one's duty of care.
In one case, there is the coverage of personnel requirements, especially after the specialists are already being withdrawn from hospitals by the Hospital Relief Act 2018, which hit the care industry like a bomb and almost led to the impossibility of employing qualified and highly qualified personnel , would give another blow that cannot be compensated financially and personally.
In the 1st wave we had to work with overtime and the corresponding, higher remuneration, which made economic support impossible, but we are promised that a special key will be used for more effort, with this according to the previous plans an overtime and associated higher wages are not compensated.
If, with an average monthly working time of 21 days, 80% of the employees are sent home for 3 days in order to comply with the duty of care, it is completely unclear who bears the additional costs and who should do the additional work. This is only a question if a second wave does not also result in a high infection rate among the carers.
This leads us to 4:
4. Obligation to care from the supply contract.
Almost all care companies settle accounts through the AOK / ARGE and accordingly have a supply contract with the consortium. This supply contract stipulates that, depending on the federal state, there is an obligation to care for at least one to three months, even if the contract is terminated. In nursing homes, assisted living as well as outpatient care at home, it must therefore be ensured that care has to be provided.
And this leads to an area of tension: on the one hand, we have to carry out the care and accordingly ensure that the promised care and support takes place. At the same time, we also have to fulfill our duty of care. If we leave one thing behind, the management of the company is liable to prosecution for failure to provide assistance, punishable by a penalty of up to 5 years plus high civil law risks. However, if the company does not comply with the duty of care when checking employees for a potential infection and allows women to continue working despite the increased temperature, assuming that it is only about the monthly cycle, but one employee is already carrying a Covid-19 infection , and if this now employs at least one patient, the care management is exposed to the charge of negligent bodily harm due to negligent duty of care. And what happens when a person dies: In this case we speak of negligent
Killing.
2. Addendum: In Berlin there are even 50% of the dead - 92 that have been forgotten by politics.
https://www.noz.de/lokales/osnabrueck/artikel/2197576/132-corona-todesfaelle-in-heimen-wurde-im-kreis-osnabrueck-zu-wenig-getestet
