Counterpoint 1: Sweden delayed locking down nursing homes and then implemented it really poorly. A huge percentage of COVID deaths were due to a nurse getting sick, coming to work anyway and basically killing half of the residents. Without lockdowns your 95 old grandmother would probably have been dead by now.<p>Counterpoint 2: did you take care of her and talked to her everyday, or maybe taken her home? Otherwise at 95 she could end up like this with and without lockdowns.<p>I find it funny that you bring numbers into this (at her age she had only 3.4 years to live but only 11% chance if dying of COVID). You cannot mix emotional and cold like that in the same post...
My grandparents had just moved into a nice elder care home right before COVID lockdowns started. They were put into the same conditions as described by the OP (although at least they had each other). I remember receiving a photo of them looking at my mom and her siblings through glass doors, that was the maximum of contact they were allowed from visits.<p>They and my family decided to take them out and put them back in their own house instead of leaving them in lockdown. Reading this, I'm glad that decision was made.
Depends on where the facility was I guess, as they burned through many states/provinces (underfunded?) places pretty badly when covid started. Hard to manage when the usually-part-time staff is either the transmission vector or flees the scene. Perhaps Covid revealed that far too many of these places are merely storage containers for those unable to live on their own?
Correlation is not causation. As sad as it is, saying that a 95 year old doesn't suffer from age related decline is a tall assumption. What is the purpose of nursing homes for advanced aged people? That is the question that one has to answer, i guess. Is it to keep them alive and physically healthy? I'm sure there are disagreements on this. But if it is not this, what is the purpose? To give t hem as much joy as possible without regard to longevity? A Nursing home likely cannot customize the priorities per patient. If a person wants a different priority than what is supplied i suppose they are on their own to supply that.
This is what happens when health policy is based on media optics and public opinion, along with a myopic view on “health”. Can’t really blame health authorities too much, they would have met a lot more criticism if they had a more loose Covid policy.
Why not try to use technology to bridge the gap? I know video chat might be beyond some people, but a phone call from a couple family members every week seems simple enough.