Minnesota had its work cut out for it under Democratic Governor Tim Walz during the COVID-19 pandemic as four in five of those who’ve died from COVID have been residents or staff members at congregate care facilities like nursing homes and assisted living centers.
There has been pushback on these raw numbers, particularly in light of a policy at the beginning allowing facilities to take COVID-positive patients after they were discharged from hospitals.
Minnesota’s policy, which has since been scrubbed from the state government website where it used to be found publicly had to get pulled out of a dustbin via Wayback Machine. The document said that “Patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 who still require transmission-based precautions for COVID-19 can be safely transferred back to congregate living facilities.”
The policy then went on to say: “It is the recommendation of MDH that patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 can be discharged when clinically indicated and neither discontinuation of transmission-based precautions nor the establishment of two negative COVID-19 tests is required prior to hospital discharge.”
By May 2020, the results were catastrophic for long-term care residents as more than 80% of COVID-19 deaths across the state had occurred in these facilities. Although this data was concerning, Governor Walz defended the policy.
“This was what everyone was doing. This was not a mistake. It wasn’t like no one thought about this. There was complexity in how you deal with this,” the Democratic governor said.
In a piece by the Star Tribune, nursing homes said they felt left out of the supply chain for necessary items like personal protective equipment (PPE).
The State Department of Health “informed providers in April that its emergency stockpile of N95 masks was reserved for ‘hospital settings only’ and that they should wait until their supplies had dwindled to ‘zero to three days’ before requesting more gear,” the report said.
“As an alternative, the state encouraged nursing homes to consider using nonmedical cloth masks and to ‘connect with local communities for donations,’’ it continued.
It was a small part of the larger issue we saw pop up in those early days of the pandemic.
“Nursing home residents aren’t getting half of our resources or half of our attention, yet they account for roughly half the deaths,” David Grabowski, a health care policy professor at Harvard Medical School, told The Atlantic in April 2020. “We don’t value their lives as much as other people’s.”
Families also raised the alarm, saying they were kept in the dark about COVID-positive cases at nursing homes and denied last words with their loved ones during visits. It also cautioned against residents going home with families for visits during this time, according to the Walz administration.
In its executive order 20-99, the Minnesota Department of Health said: “MDH strongly recommends against families bringing residents of long-term care facilities to their homes during this time. This recommendation applies whether residents have previously been diagnosed with COVID-19 or have recently tested negative for COVID-19,” the Minnesota’s Department of Health said.
Minnesota was hardly the only state being criticized for nursing home policies brought about by the pandemic. That year, then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered nursing homes to receive patients suspected of having COVID-19 as well; a move that also drew mounting backlash. Under Cuomo’s decree, nursing homes also were not allowed to ask if a patient entering the facility had COVID.
