DEAR EDITOR:

With the relaxed quarantine rules now in place throughout the nation and the transmission of COVID-19 most certainly on the rise, there is an area of continuing vulnerability that must be addressed immediately.

The issue of advanced aged, close contact, compromised immune systems and other underlying health conditions are all present in our nursing homes. We routinely place our trust in nursing homes to care for our loved ones when we are unable to do so ourselves.

The first wave dramatically took its gruesome toll in almost all of them and, unless some dramatic changes are made, it will most certainly ravage the homes once again. Containment methods that are standard operating procedures in our hospitals have proven to be effective in mitigating the transmission of the virus while patients are under their care. Most certainly, these same proven protocols also should be standard operating procedure for the cloistered residents of our nursing homes as well. The health and well-being, as well as the very lives, of our mothers, fathers, grandparents and other loved ones are at stake, and unless dramatic changes are made within the nursing home environment, the Grim Reaper will once again have his way.

Now is the time to institute a proven safe operating system — with personal protective equipment required, including all of the rigid, cumbersome protection requirements most effectively used in the operation in our hospitals — into the nursing homes as well.

We must not stand by with our loved ones alone in their rooms, without bringing forth the entire safety arsenal at our disposal. Failure to take immediate aggressive action implementing the hospital guidelines spells doom for our loved ones.

I speak not of the cost associated with implementing these medical guidelines, knowing full well that the economics may well make the homes reticent to change, but speak only to the value to protecting a life. The life at stake may well be your loved one.

ART SEE

Canfield