We hear much in current media about racism and sexism, ..but little about agism.

Elder care crisis/ "Neglected No More" by ANDRE PICARD

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-2-2021-1.5933097/march-2-2021-episode-transcript-1.5934381

André Picard on need for philosophical change in elder care
Guest: Andre Picard

MATT GALLOWAY: Last spring, at the start of this pandemic, a disturbing and shocking picture emerged, elderly Canadians living in long-term care were dying in alarming numbers, but it was more than the numbers. The conditions in the homes were often abysmal as well. When the military was sent in to facilities in Quebec and Ontario, they documented filth, force feeding, cockroaches, abuse and patients left in soiled diapers for hours. Here's Ontario's Premier Doug Ford in May of last year.

DOUG FORD: I think it's appalling. I think it's disgusting what has happened. Just the dignity of these patients in long-term care not being cleaned. It's so disturbing. When I read this, it was hard to get through. It was the worst report, most heart-wrenching report I have ever read in my entire life.

MATT GALLOWAY: Andre Picard knows that suffering all too well. As the Globe and Mail's health columnist, he has covered the crisis in long-term care during this pandemic and long before. And like millions across Canada, he's also felt it personally. Andre Picard's new book is "Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada's Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic". Andre, good morning.

ANDRE PICARD: Good morning.

MATT GALLOWAY: I want to talk about the book in just a moment, but we are just coming up on a year of this pandemic. Where do you think we're at in the course of our journey, if I can put it that way, through COVID-19?

ANDRE PICARD: We're at a really important point where there's a lot of hope on the horizon, but there's also these potential dark clouds. You know, there's the variants. There's the people slacking off once they see people getting vaccinated. So we're at this point where we really have a chance to finally get control of the pandemic, but where we also have the risk of losing control again and seeing another wave, which I think would be even more devastating. We know that each subsequent wave is worse for a whole bunch of reasons.

MATT GALLOWAY: There has been so much angst and hand-wringing about the rollout when it comes to vaccines not coming fast enough. Are the systems in place to ensure that people can get the vaccines? It opens up in Alberta, and the website crashes. People can't get through. What do you make of how the vaccines have been rolled out now that they are starting to arrive?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, you know, it's been painful. Let's be honest, it's been difficult. But the fact that the websites are crashing, it's kind of a good sign. It shows that people understand the importance of vaccination, and they want it. And those are good things. But we have to have a little bit of patience. We have to recognize that the whole world wants these vaccines that Canadians want, too. And it's going to come slowly. We're going to have to take our turn, and we're going to have to be patient. And none of those things are easy after a year being locked up.

MATT GALLOWAY: We've been talking on the program about how to prioritize who gets the vaccinations first, who's at the top of that queue? And obviously, age is a huge concern. But there are many other groups who are saying that you need to look at those who are on the front line if I can put it that way. Restaurant workers, people working in grocery stores, obviously those working in hospitals with patients, but also teachers, for example. How should that be worked out? How do we go about figuring out who should be at the front of the queue?

ANDRE PICARD: It's never going to be done right. Let's be honest. We can't please everyone. I think you have to do the simplest way. And I think that's going by age. And the other solution, of course, is the more vaccines we have, the fewer of these discussions we have to have. But I think practically, we have to look at who has been harmed the most, who's most at risk? And that's almost strictly age-based.

MATT GALLOWAY: As we start to stand back and look at what we have learned over the course of the last year, one of the real reckonings that we have had, obviously, is what unfolded in long-term care, how surprised were you to find out what was going on in long-term care homes over the course of this pandemic?

ANDRE PICARD: Sadly, I wasn't particularly surprised. I was appalled. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised. You know, we had created this perfect storm of conditions for the spread of the coronavirus, a respiratory virus. You know, the most shocking thing is how we didn't raise the ramparts immediately back in January, February. Because anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge about infectious disease or nursing homes would know that these are sitting ducks.

MATT GALLOWAY: Some of the reckoning is already happening. In Ontario, there's a commission in that province looking at what unfolded in long-term care. Dr. David Williams, the chief medical officer of health, says in many ways he was caught unawares by this.

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, sort of a story that gets played over and over again. You know, we had these wonderful reports about SARS in 2003. You could literally take those reports and change the dates and change the numbers, and we could republish them. We have learned virtually nothing. So why was he shocked? Well, I guess he didn't read his SARS reports. I just can't explain it.

MATT GALLOWAY: In Quebec, the coroner has postponed an inquiry into a long-term care home where more than 40 residents died of COVID-19. There's the consideration perhaps of laying charges against the owners once that inquiry is back. What do you think will be revealed there?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think we'll just have the same revelations that we always get that these homes were unprepared. They're understaffed. The infrastructure is poor. The ownership was totally out of their depth. So all the things we know over and over again just get repeated in inquiries. I, for one, am sick of reading these reports because they all say the same thing, they all have the same conclusions, and we don't really act on them. So at some point,, we have to stop studying, and we have to start acting.

MATT GALLOWAY: You say in the book that COVID didn't break the long-term care system. It exposed a system that was already broken. What did COVID reveal about the state of long-term care in this country?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think COVID revealed decades and decades of neglect. It revealed ageism. It revealed that we don't really take older people seriously. We do see them as disposable. And then this virus just got in there and just showed how disposable they were.

André Picard on need for philosophical change in elder care That's a really bracing statement to make that... that in some ways, our society sees older people as disposable. I mean, again, in this... in the book, you say the real villain is society's profound and longstanding neglect of our elders. What's going on there? I mean, why and how could we possibly think that?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it's... it boggles the mind. Sometimes when I was working on this, I was like, how did we ever get to this, you know? I think there's some historical reasons. We have to understand these homes have their origins in the penal system, in the jail system. These were workhouses. Until the 1960s, people had to work for their keep. I think some of it is just our society revolves around money, around the economy. Once you stop working, you become a burden. You become a cost. And that's how we treat older people. We tend to forget that they've paid in for half a century of work, and their long-term care should be essentially cashing in on your insurance. Now, the other aspect is that long-term care is not part of our health system. It's something just sort of sitting off on the side, making us uncomfortable. And ultimately, you know, we talked about neglect. We talk about ageism. I call it in the book "Elder Apartheid". Once people get old and rickety, we put them off in these homes, out of sight, out of mind, go there to die. We don't want to know anything about you.

MATT GALLOWAY: In the face of what was unfolding in the long-term care homes in this pandemic. You made a suggestion on this program and elsewhere that I think a lot of people perhaps thought was controversial at the time, saying that Canadian families, if they have a loved one in long-term care, that they should get that loved one out of the long term care home if they could, at least during this pandemic. Do you still stand by that?

ANDRE PICARD: Absolutely. I think the only regret I have is not having said it a few weeks earlier, to be honest. All the writing was on the wall in January, February about what was coming. And I could see that nothing was being done. And that... that was the reality. The reality is you should have tried to get your loved one out if you could. Now, the reality is most people couldn't. That's why they're there in the first place. But I think it had to be stated in those stark terms just to underscore just how bad things were at that point.

MATT GALLOWAY: What did you hear from family members in the wake of that comment?

ANDRE PICARD: It got a mixed reaction, like many things I write. A lot of people were very, very angry. How dare you guilt me! Nobody wants their loved one to be there in the first place. They feel guilty. I've lived this, but there is also this recognition that, yeah, you're right, I recognize how bad it is, but I don't know what to do? I'm powerless. I don't have the ability to care at home for my loved one. And that's a fundamental problem of the system, is people end up there by default because we don't have adequate home care, we don't have supportive housing, we don't have affordable housing. There's all these policy reasons that people end up in the wrong place, and family members live this, and they feel the guilt of it every single day.

MATT GALLOWAY: You write about this, but this is also personal for you. And I don't know how comfortable you are in talking about your own situation, but your father-in-law was in a nursing home. What happened last year?

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, so I'm an old-school journalist. I don't tend to write first-person pieces, [chuckle] but yeah, I did talk about my father-in-law on Twitter. Very healthy man, 88-year-old, living in not in a long-term care home, but in a residence for seniors. So very independent, played tennis three times a week, played bridge, went to church every day. Then the lockdown came, lockdown in March. In July, he died. We kind of in the family say he died of a broken heart. He died of loneliness, of being inactive. You know, we forget that collateral damage that happened to a lot of people, that locking out of families was really, really devastating.

MATT GALLOWAY: I'm sorry for what your family has gone through. What was it like for you to see... to see that unfold?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, it was horrible, you know, and I... my family didn't suffer any more than others. Many suffered much, much more. We take some comfort in knowing that he died quickly. He had his lunch and went and sat down and died of a heart attack. If you're going to go, maybe that's the way to go. But many people just could see their family members only by Skype, or you didn't do it at all. That's way, way worse. You know, the horrors that people injured during this, I don't think we'll ever fully understand. Hundreds of thousands of people went through this.

MATT GALLOWAY: We are learning more. And I mean, again, it's to our detriment that perhaps we didn't know enough about them before a crisis like this struck. But we're learning more about the individuals who are engaged in long-term care. And one of them that you introduce us to in the book is Josephine Marquez, personal support worker. Why did you want to talk about Josephine's role?

ANDRE PICARD: The personal support workers are so essential. They help people with all the activities of daily living and all the hands-on stuff, and they're taken for granted. They're underpaid. They're overworked. This is really demanding work. Ninety per cent of that work is done by women. Almost three-quarters are immigrants or refugees - so very racialized populations. And Josephine is an example of, you know, in long-term care, there's a lot of turnover. A lot of workers come and go because it's horrible work. But she's one of the lifers. So about a third of the personal support workers are there for decades. So she has been doing this forever. And I want to tell her story as an example of how the.... the profession has unravelled over time. So she gets paid less today than she did 25 years ago because wages have come down. Her workload has doubled. The patients she cares for are very different. And yet, she's still very, very dedicated. So I want to tell the story of the mistreatment of workers through the the eyes of one worker who still loves what she does, but, you know, just is frustrated by how she's treated.

MATT GALLOWAY: How does that happen? I mean, again, it goes back to the idea of value and what we value in our society? How does it happen that the salaries of PSW have declined?

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, it's what we value. It's who we value. You know, this pandemic in nursing homes has been this intersection of of racism, of sexism and ageism. It's been this perfect storm of all of those things. And, you know, it's racialized women caring for older people. Well, a triple ability to neglect and ignore. That... that's what we see.

MATT GALLOWAY: Eldercare is not cheap in this country. It's often very expensive if you're looking at housing a loved one in in a long-term care facility. So how do we square that? That... that... that it's expensive, but that the people who are there on the front lines doing that incredibly important work aren't making enough to make ends meet. And so they have to move from home to home, which then ends up, as we know, spreading COVID around.

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah, the money part of the equation is really difficult for people to understand. You can pay $2,000... up to 15,000 dollars a month. Most of that is for accommodation. And then the... the care portion is provided largely by government. And they're cheap. That's the reality. You get 180 dollars a day to care for a person in a home. That's the allocation to a home. And it's enough to pay a couple of hours of hands on-care, and people need a lot more. So I think we confuse that... that cost as thinking that we're paying for more care, but we're actually paying landlords for a pretty crappy accommodation in many instances.

MATT GALLOWAY: Would this change if you were to eliminate the for-profit care? This has been a lively debate. Would that change that equation, do you think?

ANDRE PICARD: You know, this is a complicated debate. We could spend an hour talking about this one. But I think the short answer is it's a simplistic solution to a complicated problem. I don't think we need for-profit care. It doesn't make things better. But I also don't think we could eliminate it overnight. It's there for a reason. It's there because governments refuse to invest in infrastructure. It's there because we don't care about the sector. And it's really dominant. So, you know, two-thirds of homes almost in Ontario are for-profit. You can't get rid of them overnight, but you can regulate better. You can improve the budgets. You know, a for-profit care and a not-for-profit home get the exact same allocation from government. The focus should be more on getting rid of what are essentially some slum landlords. There's a lot of landlords in this business who they don't really care about the care portion. They care about making money. Those are the ones we have to get rid of.

MATT GALLOWAY: So then how do you go about, as you say, fixing the system? At the beginning of the book, you say, let's fix the damn system. So given what you have seen and the fact that history keeps repeating itself again and again and again, what do we start to do to try to address the systemic issues that are in place?

ANDRE PICARD: To me, the starting point has to be philosophical. You have to have a philosophy that elders matter. Living in the community matters. And after that, once you have a political philosophy, then everything else is pretty, just, well, just doing it. It's putting into action those policies on a practical level. So don't make long-term care the default setting. Make a living at home the default setting. And then you address the practical reason. So I think where you start is you start where the biggest problems exist, and that's staffing. So we need standards of care. So you ensure that people who are in homes and people who get home care get a minimum of four hours of care every day. You know, we know that the conditions of work are the conditions of care. If workers are not treated well, they will never be able to deliver good care. So start with the workers. Then on the home side, fix the infrastructure, stop building prison-like facilities with 200, 300 beds, and put people in home-like settings. It's not much more expensive, and it's much more humane.

MATT GALLOWAY: And again, it goes back to that issue of value. Do you have to inject enormous amounts of money into the system to try to right the ship?

ANDRE PICARD: I think the answer to that is twofold. One is, yes, we have to spend more money after decades and decades of neglect, especially on staffing, to ensure that the hands-on care is there. But the other part of the equation is that we spend a lot of money now on mediocre care. If we spend that money differently, if we ensure that we get value, we can do a lot more with the money we have now. So I don't think we need countless money pouring in to fix this. We could do a lot with the budgets we have now if we spend them differently. So this argument that, oh, we can't have home care, it's too expensive, we can't expand care, you know, we can't have subsidized housing. It's expensive. Those things aren't true. We spend so much now on things that people don't want and don't need. If we spend differently, that would be a big, big start.

MATT GALLOWAY: One of the things people don't want is to go into long-term care at all. Generally, people want to age in place, as the phrase says. People point to Denmark as an example. What's happening abroad that would give us some degree of inspiration about how we could do this better?

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah. So Denmark is kind of the gold standard that everyone points to. And what do they do? They just had this philosophy, in the 1980s, they just... they saw the ageing coming. You know, this is no surprise that boomers were going to age. We kind of sat on our hands, but they said, oh, we're going to deal with this and we're going to have a philosophy that people are going to stay at home no matter what until it's absolutely unable to do so. So that's what they do. So investments in homecare, building care, homes that are very homelike, et cetera, what they've proven is it's... it's doable, it's affordable and it's more humane. The money argument goes out the window if you look at Denmark. Their system is cheaper overall than ours, and the care is superb.

MATT GALLOWAY: How is it cheaper overall?

ANDRE PICARD: Just look at the per capita spending. Canada spends more on... on health care than Denmark. And Denmark has a much wider array of services that it provides. Homecare, long-term care, a part of their public system. There's a continuity to it. You know, in Canada, you get your free hospital, you get your free doctor. Once you need to be in a home, you fall off a cliff, suddenly, you have to pay your 2,000 or 5,000 dollars a month. There's no logic in what we fund and what we don't fund in medicare.

MATT GALLOWAY: Knowing that there are 150 different reports that have laid out a lot of the steps that we need to take, is your sense that the will is there to do this?

ANDRE PICARD: I think the will is there. I think the question is, can we make it a priority? There's a will to do lots of things. And in Canada, we have difficulty making choices. We have very short memories. So I guess my biggest fear is we'll just forget what happened in lon-term care. You know, our older people are already cast aside. They're in these homes. They're forgettable, and... and we'll forget them. But I think, you know, ultimately we have to we have to give life to our values. That's what politics and social policy should be all about.

MATT GALLOWAY: Just two final things. One is, in writing a book like this, but in doing this work, personally, how does... how does something that this affect you?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, you know, I'm no spring chicken, so I know what's coming. And I want the care to be better for me. I don't want to have the same mediocre care that my parents had. I don't want my children to have to give up their lives and their careers to care for me because the system's inadequate. So all of this should be very personal for all of us. All of us are going to benefit from this. None of us can afford to ignore this because we're all going there.

MATT GALLOWAY: Andre, great pleasure to talk to you, as always. Thank you very much.

ANDRE PICARD: Thank you.

MATT GALLOWAY: André Picard is the Global Mail's health columnist, and the author of "Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada's Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic". You're welcome to comment on what Andre said. You can reach us through email: thecurrent@cbc.ca. The C

********************




On Sunday, February 7, 2021, bill dality <
Jan 30,2021 cbcradio/daysix episode 531

Segment on , fixing long-term care in Canada:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-14-day-6/clip/15821863-episode-531-the-meaning-gamestop-teaching-grade-1

Interview on longterm care deficiencies in Canada

These " for profit" care homes are operated not for the benefit of senior residents but for the profit of shareholders. The first loyalty of private corporations is to their shareholders!
Corporations prioritize profit over the public good.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-long-term-care-canada-1.5739798

Profit above people :It is because seniors are not valued.                    Senior's lives are not important!
Long-term care is grossly underfunded in Canada.

Medical establishment makes negative assumptions about disabled person's quality of  life.      The lives of disabled and aged persons are devalued.


****************

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/15835703-common-good-or-the-value-old-age

****************

Senior care homes are inadequately funded and regulated

From: bill dality <
Date: December 10, 2020 at 3:32 PM


600 long-term care homes across Canada are reporting Covid 19 outbreaks
80% of all Covid 19 deaths have been In institutional care homes and by far the largest portion of these deaths have been In institutions operated by private,for-profit companies.

Why have senior care homes. been unable to keep residents safe?
How is it that despite every precaution and following public health directives , it is seniors in care institutions that have taken the brunt of the deaths.
How is it that despite. stringent preventive efforts the virus continues. to infiltrate these places where the most vulnerab!e population live?
The. answer is "asymptomatic carriers'"--- people who carry the virus but do not exhibit any overt. symptoms . We now know that people who show no symptoms of Covid 19 may still carry the virus and can still transmit the virus to. others. But we still don't know what percentage of the overall population are "silent carriers"..
Screening workers at these senior care institutions using Rapid Tests for the presence of antigen proteins would be a quick and effective method in identifying. asymptomatic carriers! Rapid Tests yield results within 15 minutes (instead of waiting days for results.)
Failure to implement Rapid Tests is reminiscent of the failure to mandate the wearing of masks (and failure to provide adequate supplies of masks, sanitizer and PPE for frontline healthcare worke r s)at the beginning of ,the pandemic!
Despite all the talk about ""protecting the most vulnerable", nothing has been done since the first wave to improve the understaffed, and overcrowded conditions (conditions wch existed even prior to then pandemic) in these "surplus people warehouses".(Private For-profit care home companies by definition are paying out dividends to their shareho lders !! Profits are made by shorting and underpaying staff and reducing the number of care hours each resident is allocated ! )
A cynic would say , "They don't really want to save all those "useless eaters" ".(since they already have one foot in the grave, what harm can there be in giving them a helpful little nudge?)....and besides ,identifying and removing asymptomatic care workers from the work force would .make it more difficult to fulfill the institution 's responsibility to provide basic care to. it's residents".

On a positive note, th e first doses of the vaccine will go to senior care home residents. But again a cynic would say, "the captive old people " stuck in these institutions will be "volunteered" to participate in what will essentially be a "fourth phase trial" to test it's safety and effectiveness before the rest of us receive it! (This vaccine has not been administered to this age group in the first three clinical trials.)
The Pfizer vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, and this type of vaccine has never been made and used before. How it responds in different age groups is not known.The long-term effects of mRNA vaccines are not known. There are many other unknowns.We are all going to be "guinea pigs"! It will be a massive experiment. We will learn a lot! But for now, despite the fact that the vaccine has been made in record time and it's approval has been fast-tracked, we are being asked to trust that the vaccines have been adequately tested,and the risk of taking the. vaccines is far less than the risk of not taking the vaccine and getting the virus!
In the meantime hospitalizations and deaths from Covid 19 continue to increase!!
Many people will be flouting the public health orders to stay home through the holiday season!
The case numbers in January, (after Christmas and New Year's celebrations and gatherings )will be astronomic!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/big-spend-long-term-care-aid-dividends-1.5832941
***********************
On Wednesday, November 25, 2020, bill dality <namtoo@gmail.com> wrote:
Numbers keep going up. (over 1000 in BC yesterday) They are not levelling off! I was out yesterday and noticed. traffic is horrendous..People are not  staying home!....and it isn't even Christmas shopping season  yet! This  doesn't look good!! People are resistant to changing their way of life.
Numbers are worst in regions where individual freedom and. the economy are  given more weight than public health (e.g. Alberta and Ontario)

********************* "
On Saturday, November 21, 2020, bill dality wrote:

Second wave

Canada facing over-capacity as Covid virus overwhelms healthcare infrastructure
Case counts surge across Canada(1100 yesterday in Alberta;1500 in Ontario).
With hospitals at capacity , Increased case counts means more deaths.



******************* "
Tuesday, October 6, 2020, 01:05:18 p.m. MDT, bill dality <wrote:



if it is true that 2/3 of all deaths in a pandemic happen in the second wave....and if the  first wave claimed 9000 deaths, then the second wave will claim 18000 in Canada for a total of 27,000 !
In the US tjese numbrrrs are 200,000 (1st wave) and 400,000 (2nd wave) fatalities!(for a total of 600,000 deaths)
extrapolating to the global effect of tthe pandemic on the human population...Covid-19 will depopulate the planet by 3 million people*!
(*to date  · More Than 1 Million People Have Died From COVID-19 Worldwide :)

Of course these numbers can be reduced if people follow public health guidance and if there is an early rollout of. a vaccine


******************
On Wednesday, May 27, 2020, bill dality <te:




72% of all Covid-19 deaths in Canada ocurred in senior's care homes.
Thats 5,000. seniors!

this pandemic has brought out into the open in a dramatic way the discrimination faced by old people in our society

A person's value is based upon their capacity to contribute to the economy.
People beyond their productive years are no longer valued and as "surplus people" are often warehoused in institutions called nursing homes.

Scathing report released by military about conditions in private for-profit care homes.
Military report reveals horrendous conditions exposed in longterm care homes

https://m.bdnews24.com/en/detail/europe/1756201
https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/whats-inside-the-disturbing-report-on-ontarios-long-term-care-homes/

senior care should not be driven by the profit motive

***********************

On Friday, May 15, 2020, bill dality <wrote:




we have to do better in caring for our elderly.

With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that Canada's pandemic preparedness was grossly deficient.
Personal protection equipment has been in short supply since the beginning of this pandemic. Demand has exceeded supply.
Covid-19 has exposed weaknesses in our healthcare system and the inadequate state of our longterm care facilities.
72% of all deaths in Canada from Covid-19 have been in elder care homes.
Personal care workers are underpaid and underappreciated.
Care homes must be stringently regulated to ensure they are adequately staffed and providing adequate care to their residents.
Care homes for the elderly must not be operated on a for- profit basis......but must be integrated into out universal Canada Health Act.


********%%%%
Re: chinese owned senior homes

China profiting at the expense of Canada's seniors

https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-hajdu-refuses-to-criticize-chinese-owned-nursing-homes-in-canada?fbclid=IwAR2Yfchca1C5UdKbdWvzGvRHKZde2aPzI-xNk5EzCcoAdB1LG7nMpcfNL6I

apparently there are 22 senior homes owned by the Chinese Govt.



***********************
Elder care should not be a money-making business!

On Sunday, April 12, 2020, bill dality < wrote:

as a society we are falling below an acceptable standard of care for our elders.The pandemic has just brought to light an underlieing situation that has existed in these seniors care homes for a long time.

It is telling that half of all the Covid-19 deaths in BC have been seniors in nursing homes!
Residents in these facilities/institutions exist under deplorable conditions--subjected to neglect and abuse.
Many of these places are private "for profit" businesses who underpay their workers and deprive the residents of adequate care.
China owns most of these private nursing homes and is profiting at the expence of our most vulnerable elders.
It is completely immoral for vulnerable old people to be exploited in this manner.
Senior's care facilities should be an integral part of our universal,
"not-for-profit" healthcare system. They should be essential services funded by taxpayer dollars.

********

31 residents die in one month in Herron nursing home in Dorva!,Quebec.The facility is owned by Katasa Group and Development, a Gatineau-based company owned by Samir Chowieri and his three daughters. The company runs seven elder-care facilities in the province.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/covid-19-private-seniors-home-dorval-chsld-herron-1.5530327

In BC, regulators overseeing the operation of several "for profit" seniors homes owned by Chinese corporation found them in violation of acceptable standards of care.
In B.C., the Anbang Insurance Group controlled 21 retirement and care homes, as well as two in Alberta, through subsidiary Retirement Concepts from 2017 until the beginning of 2018.

https://www.peninsulanewsreview.com/business/founder-of-chinese-company-behind-21-b-c-seniors-homes-gets-18-years-for-fraud/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/selkirk-seniors-village-report-1.5394554
https://globalnews.ca/video/5055508/province-taking-over-senior-home-care

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/summerland-seniors-facility-retirement-concepts-interior-health-1.5475943

2/3 of the senior care homes in BC are publically funded but privately run

Most of these are operated by "Retirement Concepts" wch is owned by tbe Chinese government!

http://www.retirementconcepts.com/about-us/

Private companies are profit driven and place profit above the needs of residents.

The actual cost of operating such an institution is $6000./bed/ month.




**************************
Apart from conspiracy theorists claims that Covid-19 was created in a state-sponsored laboratory for use as a weapon of war.
There are dark people among us who are thinking up ways to use Covid-19 for malicious purposes..

intentional human contamination of care facilities:
We all want to believe thst people who work in healthcare are caring,compassionate people.
But then there are people among them like Elizabeth Wettlaufer (nurse Kevorkian)who killed 12 extended care residents with insulin overdoses.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wettlaufer

You can call them domestic terrorists, or embittered nihilists who want to cause maximum havoc in society, or just mentally disturbed persons (who have the mentality of serial killers)who have always dreamt of an effective way to get away with killing a maximum number of people.

Here's an act of sabotage I would never have thought of:
".... reports of teenagers purposefully coughing on produce bins and videotaping it have surfaced on social media.
The trouble with someone doing something stupid on social media is that it tends to catch on and spread rapidly. "

Times of crisis brings out the best, but also the worst in people!

"*********************

systemic agism or passive youthen azia

>this pandemic has brought out into the open in a dramatic way the discrimination faced by old people in our society
>
>A person's value is based upon their capacity to contribute to the economy.
>People beyond their productive years are no longer valued and as "surplus people" are often warehoused in institutions called "nursing homes".
>
>It is not just the virus that preferentially victimizes the elderly!
>
>if you are over 65 and no longer a productive contributor to the economy...Sorry,but there's no ventilator for you! The only care you can expect wkill be palliative!
>
>Medical care is already being rationed!
>
>have you noticed that all those elderly residents in care facilities who get infected are not taken to intensive care!
They are given morphine/fentenyl and allowed to die.
>
>https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8116223/Italian-coronavirus-victims-80-not-receive-intensive-care.html?ito=facebook_share_article-home-preview&fbclid=IwAR0McQgKeuC-LDCvuB4_0ZtvtnnhFZ8jiFBKrpKBC5S7ohdECMvWo1PX2_s

https://www.ktva.com/story/41952170/how-would-overwhelmed-hospitals-decide-who-to-treat-first?utm_content=buffer9a82c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=MP+facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR1BQI9hqTif96fchEo0P7fAOpv5dcn4Iv1bf2g2nrvP0PXebeenbobAsMMqp1sk

Are you still greedy for wealth? Then invest in bodybags and coffins!