Reports that the White House Coronavirus Task Force plans to wind down its work around late May “are alarming,” LeadingAge President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan said Tuesday.
“We need more leadership, not less, to protect older Americans whose lives are on the line,” she said, adding that the action “sends a terrible signal.”
President Trump announced the news Tuesday while touring a mask manufacturing plant in Arizona, the New York Times reported. The group, he said, will be replaced by a new advisory body that will concentrate on restarting the economy.
Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the task force, said that management of the public health response to the pandemic will return to federal agencies that had their work coordinated by the task force, according to the media outlet.
“What we need and have needed are strong and focused directives from the top, as well as a coordinated effort, for the delivery of desperately needed personal protective equipment and rapid-results testing to nursing homes, assisted living and other aging services providers,” Sloan said. “Nursing homes, assisted living and other aging services providers have been on the front line of COVID-19 for months — without the tools they need to face this vicious virus and to protect our most vulnerable Americans. Right now, it appears that our leaders are willing to leave older Americans and those who support them on the battlefield to fend for themselves.”
In other coronavirus-related news:
- The California Department of Social Services has sent a letter to licensees of senior and adult care residential facilities in the state, offering them up to $1,000 per day to temporarily accept people who have tested positive for COVID-19 so hospitals can make room for people who need acute care, according to the Mercury News. “Any guidance from the government that opens the door to send more COVID-19 into a nursing home or assisted living facility, to me, is medically unsound,” Michael Wasserman, M.D., CMD, president of the California Association of Long Term Medicine, told the media outlet. Assisted living communities, he said, are not required to have on-site medical staff and may not be able to control infections.
- Montana and Wisconsin are planning to test all assisted living and nursing facility residents and staff members, Tennessee is increasing testing at assisted living communities, and Ohio is bumping assisted living communities up to the second tier of COVID-19 testing, meaning asymptomatic residents and staff will receive priority for testing if they have been directly exposed to an outbreak, according to media reports.
- Assisted living groups in Ohio and New York are calling for more funding to pay for PPE and staffing needs.
- About 70 workers at Park Springs, an Isakson Living life plan community in Atlanta, have been sheltering in place since the end of March to protect about 500 residents, Fox4 reports. The lockdown began after four employees and a resident tested positive for the virus, the media outlet said. Since then, a 96-year-old resident with dementia tested positive for the disease, on April 23.
- Transforming Age will not reopen Meridian Manor, a Wayzata, MN, assisted living community that was closed April 18 at the direction of the Minnesota Department of Health Emergency COVID-19 task force, the company announced. The closure is “a result of multiple negative impacts of COVID-19,” Transforming Age said. As of April 27, 21 of 59 residents had tested positive for COVID-19, and two had died. Additionally, 13 workers had tested positive. “Meridian Manor is providing professional moving services to all residents, at no cost. Residents are also being offered complimentary rent at other communities within Transforming Age that have no known cases of COVID-19 and special consideration is being given to keep neighbors and friends together,” the company said.
- A reminder to continue to be careful in hiring: A temporary worker for an upscale senior living community in Denver has been charged with stealing an engagement ring and a credit card, with which she allegedly purchased a vehicle, from a resident with dementia who died of COVID-19.
