COVID-19 is one of the most serious viruses we’ve ever encountered, with nearly 3,000,000 confirmed cases and 200,000 deaths worldwide. There’s a lot we don’t yet known about the virus, and unfortunately for some, this includes what is happening with their loved ones.
“My mom is an [sic] essential personnel. She works for a police department and she's an EMT so she's very much like front lines of things. Um, she had decided to step back from being an EMT during this because her father is in a veteran's home,” Emma Verhage, a junior middle school education major at Lubbock Christian University, said.
Her grandfather lives in the New Jersey Veteran’s Home in Paramus, located in Bergen County. Several retirement homes have come under fire for the lack of communication with families about their loved ones, many of whom tested positive for the coronavirus.
“It was a lot of phone tag and back and forth … Someone will call you, we'll get back to you, stuff like that,” Verhage said. “And then all of a sudden on April 8th, I believe there were news articles posted on Facebook … and it broke the news that within a two week span there were 27 deaths and dozens of people that … tested positive for Corona. Uh, and that there were at least 10 that were already connected of those deaths to Corona.
“That morning my mom had called and specifically was like, what is the update? Like what is going on?”
Verhage’s mother was told that all was well, meanwhile, staff told local reporters that they feared losing their jobs if they spoke out against the home’s unhealthy practices—including being told not to wear protective gear, such as masks, so as not to frighten the residents.
Photo/Emma Verhage
Her grandfather was included in those who had contracted the virus, but when his caregivers began to worry that he was sick, her family wasn’t notified.
“My mom had found out that they tested him for Corona. … They tested him without consent. They're supposed to ask for the consent and they didn't let my mom know,” Verhage said. “Then they lost that test for over a week and a half there. No one could find what happened with it. At that point my mom obviously demanded another test and then within 24 hours, that test came back positive.
“And then two days later they got the results and they found that test from the original one and that one came back positive. That's when he started to develop a fever, the body aches and those kinds of symptoms,” she said.
Other families didn’t hear about their loved ones until after they had passed away.
This was the case for a friend of Verhage’s mother, a man who she came to know through their visits with family at the Veteran’s Home. He didn’t learn about his relative being ill until a funeral home called to tell him they had their remains—the retirement home made no attempts at contact.
People with family at other N.J. retirement homes are having similar experiences. Following an April 13 anonymous tip about a body in a shed at the Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center, police found 17 bodies piled in a morgue with the capacity for four people.
Barbara Shaffer, a former nurse’s assistant, and Tiffany Manriquez, an in-home caregiver, both say they are appalled and heartbroken over what is happening in N.J.
“That really is sad. I mean those people … died all by themselves, they’re family didn’t even know they died. That is a sad, sad situation,” Shaffer said. “I think with this pandemic the country is in a terrible state. It has not been handled right, as far as I’m concerned, from the very beginning. There are people who have died that should not have died, if it had been handled in the right way.”
Photo/Tiffany Manriquez
Manriquez said she believes more could have been done before the situation with residents passing became bad.
“As a caregiver, we are mandatory reporters, you know, and someone dropped the ball somewhere and I don't understand how that happened,” Manriquez said. “You have to do whatever in your power to, you know, change things. You should have called somebody.
“Even if it's outside your comfort zone and whatever they tell you to do, you're going to have to just do it, you know, you have to do it for yourself and that person,” she said. “What happens if it was your family member, what would you do?”
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Visiting family through nursing home windows
