Before the current crisis, nursing home work was already harried and backbreaking.
Each passing day brings news of another outbreak of COVID-19 at a nursing home or assisted living facility in Massachusetts. On April 4, The Boston Globe reported that state health officials had found outbreaks in at least 94 senior facilities; by April 20 there were 214 such facilities with multiple cases of infection. As of this writing, 1,059 residents of long-term care facilities in Massachusetts have died from the virus, a shocking 54 percent of the 1,961 total deaths statewide.
These figures will continue to rise, because although the virus can affect anyone, the residents of long-term care facilities are particularly susceptible to COVID-19, given dynamics such as age, underlying illnesses, and their proximity to one another (including shared rooms and bathrooms) and to their caregivers. But these commonly accepted factors are not the only reason COVID-19 is proliferating in our nursing homes: The poverty wages paid to caregivers and the understaffing of our long-term care facilities are also to blame.
The national median wage of Certified Nursing Assistants, who make up the bulk of the nursing home workforce, is $14.25 per hour — or $29,640 per year with a 40-hour work week. Although wages are somewhat higher locally, they are nowhere close to a living wage. Many who work in these facilities hold multiple jobs — in another nursing home or home care agency, for example — in order to pay rent and put food on the table. Given how COVID-19 is transmitted by asymptomatic individuals, when an outbreak begins in one facility, it is unlikely to be contained there for very long.
In an outbreak across several nursing homes in Washington state beginning in February, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in part “staff members working in multiple facilities contributed to intra- and interfacility spread.” If we ever get a full accounting, the same will surely prove to be true here in Massachusetts and across the country…
To read the entire article from The Boston Globe, click https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/25/opinion/poverty-wages-nursing-homes-have-accelerated-coronavirus-outbreak
