As the next round of house arrest is being pushed due to a spike in covid19 cases, reporting of the collateral deaths as a result of lockdowns gets only nominal play.

Nursing home watchdogs are being flooded with reports of residents kept in soiled diapers so long their skin peeled off, left with bedsores that cut to the bone, and allowed to wither away in starvation or thirst.

A nursing home expert who analyzed data from the country’s 15,000 facilities for The Associated Press estimates that for every two COVID-19 victims in long-term care, there is another who died prematurely of other causes. Those “excess deaths” beyond the normal rate of fatalities in nursing homes could total more than 40,000 since March.

While carrying for COVID patients certainly has taxed long-term care facilities — even keeping staff has been difficult due to fear and panic over contracting the Wuhan lung rot — what has really been the game changer was the complete shutout of family members and/or close friends who regularly showed up at these facilities to help take care of the needs of their loved ones.

Mairead Painter, Connecticut’s long-term care ombudsman, said with dentists shut out, ill-fitting dentures went unfixed, a factor in mounting accounts of malnutrition, and with podiatrists gone, toenails went untrimmed, posing the possibility of painful conditions in diabetes patients.

Even more widespread, as loved ones lost access to homes, was critical help with residents’ feeding, bathing, dressing and other tasks. The burden fell on aides already working tough shifts for little pay.

“I don’t think anyone really understood how much time friends and family, volunteers and other people spent in the nursing home and supplemented that hands-on care,” Painter said.

Didn’t understand or didn’t care?

We know that the elderly are not valued by many and not only have many of these facilities tried to explain deaths from neglect or isolation as either non-existent or to-be-expected, even the nursing home trade group American Health Care Association dismisses any notion of widespread problems as mere “speculation.”

Families haven’t forgotten their loved ones. They were locked out.

“The older population already runs the risk of being very lonely in our society, whether they live in a facility such as ours or they live at home. So that was something we saw right away among the dementia patients — the ones who really require a lot of routine and normalcy,” Katy Tenner told ABC News’ daily podcast, “Start Here.” “There was nothing normal or routine about suddenly having their loved ones not being able to come visit.”

Nursing homes, memory care facilities, even retirement communities for the active senior hunkered down and kept everyone but staff away. During the early weeks of the pandemic, it certainly made sense. Certainly nothing could strike more fear into the hearts of staff more than NY Gov. Cuomo’s complete FUBAR order to nursing homes to accept covid-positive patients. The huge numbers of deaths he caused should never be forgotten, no matter how much he wants to blame others.

After forcing nursing homes to accept covid patients, presiding over a state with one of the highest death rates in the country, and writing a book about what a great job he did, Gov. Cuomo has decided the problem here is everyone else https://t.co/8VUztUk274

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 18, 2020

And it’s not just the deaths in facilities — it is other deaths of despair and the future deaths from things like cancer, heart disease, malnourishment and starvation due to endless months of mind-numbing lockdowns that we must insist be taken into consideration.

UPDATE Looks like YouTube has censored Thomas Woods’ talk cuz it doesn’t line up with the narrative. You can find the video here.

The current uptick in cases is not because we didn’t shutdown hard enough or long enough or didn’t wear enough masks. The spike is all over, from South Korea to Italy. A virus is gonna virus.

In the meantime, it is up to us to take care of our most vulnerable. I don’t just mean vulnerable to covid, but vulnerable to the damage wrought by relentless isolation. Especially at Thanksgiving, don’t be frightened into letting members of your family be forgotten.

featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.