‘Utterly baffling’ Really? Are you kidding me, or do you think we’re stupid?
You introduce -intentionally, or even otherwise – the bug into an elderly populated nursing home environment and you’re ‘baffled’? Now, of the same attention can be paid to the Gubbernor of New York state and the mayor of New York City…………
‘Utterly baffling’: 76 vets die of Covid at soldiers home
They stormed the beaches at Normandy, liberated Nazi concentration camps and fought the Cold War in Korea and Vietnam only to die in their beds from a virus that infiltrated the veteran’s center in western Massachusetts that was their home.
But on Friday the loved ones of the 76 veterans who, starting in March, died from the coronavirus at the Holyoke Soldiers Home, received a measure of belated justice.
Former Superintendent Bennett Walsh, a Marine, and the home’s ousted medical director, Dr. David Clinton, were each charged with five counts of “wantonly or recklessly” causing or permitting bodily harm and five counts of neglect or mistreatment of an older or disabled person, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy announced.
“My heart goes out to the families that lost loved ones at the Holyoke Soldiers Home,” Healy said. “They risked their lives from Normandy to the jungles of Vietnam and to know that they died under these circumstances is truly shocking.”
Walsh, 50, and Clinton, 71, are accused of making the “disastrous decision” on March 27 to mix patients already displaying symptoms with healthy patients and accelerate the spread of Covid-19 through the center.
But the charges Healy announced stem specifically from the decision by the pair to place five asymptomatic veterans into what had been a dining area “a few feet apart” from four other vets who already had Covid-19.
One of them died, two became infected, and the other two were spared, Healy said.
Walsh and Clinton have claimed that they were grappling with staffing shortages and that they had been in regular contact with their direct supervisor, former Secretary Francisco Urena at the Department of Veterans’ Services in Boston, and other state officials, since March 21 when the first vet at the home tested positive for Covid-19.
Healy said the accused men were passing the buck. “They were the ultimate decision-makers,” she said.
In a damning report released in June, former federal prosecutor Mark Pearlstein concluded the directors at the home made “utterly baffling” mistakes while responding to the deadly outbreak.
“Even the best preparations and most careful response cannot eliminate the threat of Covid-19,” Perlstein said in the 174-page report. “But this does not excuse a failure to plan and execute on longstanding infection control principles and to seek outside help when it is required to keep patients safe — indeed, the extraordinary danger of Covid-19 makes these steps all the more important.”
The report quoted one worker at the facility who said it “felt like it was moving the concentration camp, we were moving these unknowing veterans off to die.”
Walsh, who is on administrative leave, and Clinton, who resigned after the scandal broke, are expected to be arraigned in the coming days and both could wind up facing prison sentences if convicted, Healy said.
More than 2,000 veterans have died of Covid-19 and they constitute about one percent of the more than 204,088 coronavirus fatalities, according to the latest NBC News tally.