“If you don’t see it, you really don’t understand how difficult it is,” said Louise Santee, a longtime caregiver who brought a curling iron to work to calm a resident who could not understand why she could no longer go to the hairdresser. “It is truly heart-wrenching when you see what this has done to our people.”

In interviews, caregivers as well as patient advocates, medical professionals, facility managers and residents themselves said they had never experienced anything like the first six months of the pandemic.

Maintenance workers were sent to hardware stores to buy disposable paint tarps that could be fashioned into gowns. Nurses pleaded with their bosses to let them lower their masks just so residents could recognize them; some forced their family members to go stay with relatives, terrified that they would bring the virus into their home. And some residents could not understand why they were suddenly cut off from their families and the world.

The chaos was so pervasive that it was nearly impossible, everyone said, to separate what was happening from the politics at play. As caretakers endured day after exhausting day, state officials set forth new regulations to govern how nursing homes should work. And President Trump delivered a drumbeat of dangerous claims — mocking masks, praising unproven treatments, speculating about bleach and about the virus disappearing.

Some residents became so dismayed by Mr. Trump’s conduct that they set up voter registration drives on their campuses; others held mini protests near major roads, holding signs and soliciting honks from passing vehicles. A few frontline workers began phone banking at home and writing to their state legislators.

And top officials at care facilities voiced deep frustration about how the virus response rapidly devolved from a public health issue to a partisan fight. They insisted that faster, clearer and better-coordinated government intervention could have saved lives.

“When you work in our business, you become accustomed to a certain level of bumbling,” said Jim Bernardo, the president of Presbyterian Senior Living, which cares for thousands of older people in Pennsylvania and beyond. “This rose to an entirely different level.”

Source: New York Times

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