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HOSPITAL VISITOR BAN IS CRUEL
boblonsberry.com ^ | 05/05/2020 | Bob Lonsberry

Posted on 05/05/2020 9:52:31 AM PDT by shortstop

Andrew Cuomo’s policy of barring visitors in nursing homes and hospitals is inhumane and illogical.

It inflicts cruel and unusual punishment upon people who have done nothing other than have the misfortune to live under his tyrannical rule.

He has imposed suffering of the cruelest nature upon residents, patients and families, and it is an indictment of the health care industry that it has not challenged him on behalf of the people it supposedly serves.

In mid-March, Andrew Cuomo placed a ban on all visitors to nursing homes. Unfortunately, he simultaneously approved the transfer of covid-positive patients to nursing homes and allowed covid-positive employees to continue to provide care.

Families can’t enter nursing homes because they might bring the virus, but the state of New York sent the virus there. No screening of employees or vendors, and no admittance for families.

It made no sense.

And it doomed scores to lonely unattended deaths.

As it continues to do, and as a similar visitor ban at hospitals dooms families in health crisis to separation and pain.

Parents send children to surgery and hospitalization, alone. Husbands with cancer disappear into fortress-like hospitals, their wives and children weeping at the door, unable to follow, unable to comfort, unable to share.

Because Andrew Cuomo said so.

Because he wants it that way.

And it is wrong. Morally wrong. Incomprehensibly cruel. Completely unnecessary.

Because if employees can go in and out of a hospital or nursing home, so can family members.

Period.

It’s that simple.

If it is possible to use infection control, testing and screening to move doctors and nurses, cooks and janitors, in and out of health-care facilities, then those same steps can allow spouses and children to do the same.

And it is a hateful, arrogant thoughtlessness that asserts otherwise.

To believe that a doctor or lab tech or CNA is more important to an elderly person or hospital patient than a loving relative is preposterous.

Further, the notion that some institution or non-judicial exercise of governmental power could separate members of a family from one another is not only un-American, it is inhuman. The winning of an election or the conferral of a medical degree does not give one power superior to the God-given bonds of love and family.

Loved ones standing in parking lots holding up signs are a testament to their purity and the governor’s evil.

Because, again, this is unnecessary.

Vendors make daily deliveries to hospitals and nursing homes. Ladies come in to tend the plants. Custodial staff comes in to mop the floors and clean the bathrooms. Clerks come in to update reports and file records. Any number of people wearing scrubs punch in and out around the clock. CNAs work their shifts like regular.

But clergy cannot visit to administer sacred rites or to pray or to offer counsel.

Spouses and children are forbidden, parents and friends may not enter. Patients and residents are condemned to small, solitary, suffering existences, pent up in little rooms suffering from the isolation, too often dying alone.

Yes, we know this is true of covid patients. But they are less than one percent of the people hospitalized or dying in America. We are wrong to ignore the needless suffering imposed on all the elderly and ill, regardless of their diagnosis.

And the governor is wrong to make it continue.

And he is dishonest when he seeks to avoid responsibility for it.

He is Andrew the Virus King, and he is all powerful. It is his dictate that has closed the nursing home and hospital doors, and only he can open them.

Perhaps he needs to bring back the imagery of his mother, the Matilda for whom all this is theoretically being done. Perhaps he needs to think of his own mother, alone and unvisited in a disorienting institution. Maybe he could stand in the parking lot and wave.

Or maybe he could stop this torture.

There are masks aplenty – he has mandated surpluses extending three months into the future – and unused testing capabilities – his parking-lot nose swabbings sit mostly empty. If protocols and procedures can be developed for patients’ caregivers, they can be developed for patients’ spouses.

If the janitor can get in your child’s room, so can you.

And it is a sin that the health care community doesn’t demand it, and the governor doesn’t allow it.


TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: covid19; cuome; governor
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This thread is full of morons who clearly don’t understand any of this. First, they whine about being able to break free from the tyranny! They screech that the “at risk” people should stay at home.

And now...they want to bitch about not being able to bring their asymptomatic bodies into the place where the MOST susceptible people are.

If you want to spend so much time with them, bring them to your home and care for them.

It’s like you have no regard for anyone’s safety, as long as you can get what you want.

What a bunch of babies.

And yes...my wife had half of her colon removed in the middle of this. My mother in law is in a SNF and hasn’t had visitors for both.

So, I understand the pain associated with this. What I don’t understand is how selfish and down right stupid so many Freepers are.


21 posted on 05/05/2020 10:55:56 AM PDT by Vermont Lt
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To: Vermont Lt

Die alone in 14 days...

Or..

Die with my family at my side today...

Yep, no issues...


22 posted on 05/05/2020 11:08:03 AM PDT by dakine
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To: Gay State Conservative
I agree. I work in a hospital. I am not in favor of this lock down nonsense but regarding this policy I think, for the time being it's wise. There are exceptions in extremes cases where the death of the patient is is imminent and family and clergy are allowed to say final good byes.
23 posted on 05/05/2020 11:40:23 AM PDT by jmacusa (If we're all equal how is diversity our strength?)
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To: Gay State Conservative

Ditto that....And I still work sometimes at a Hosp.


24 posted on 05/05/2020 11:43:59 AM PDT by Osage Orange (Mar's isn't a place to raise your kid...)
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To: shortstop

Extremely. One evening, I saw a middle aged couple standing outside the ground floor window of a care institution. The woman was calling, “Mother, I love you, Mother,” and her husband was holding up a small piece of paper to the window (I think it probably had mother’s name on it so the nurse could tell her). It literally made me cry.

It’s much crueler to die alone than anything else, and much crueler for the families and friends to know that this person (especially an older confused person) died alone. And not even the clergy was allowed to visit them.


25 posted on 05/05/2020 11:44:21 AM PDT by livius
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To: HangnJudge
Hugh?

Who are you?

Hugh?

Hugh is hugh?

I am corbfuesed

26 posted on 05/05/2020 11:46:28 AM PDT by Osage Orange (Mar's isn't a place to raise your kid...)
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To: Vermont Lt

Stupid? My mother had a heart attack, and I have COVID antibodies.

I was likely exposed when three co-workers were quite sick in December, and all three were tested for the flu, and essentially told, “We don’t know what you have, but it is NOT the flu.”

You have been buying into models, Fauci and Birx doom and gloom for months now. Yours is the selfish, one policy fits all approach.


27 posted on 05/05/2020 11:54:10 AM PDT by jps098
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To: shortstop

I pulled my 99 yo mother out of a nursing home when it became apparent I would not be able to visit her.

She is doing better at home with some nursing care I pay for along with some Medic Aid.

She will die at home when God calls her to a new home.


28 posted on 05/05/2020 12:02:03 PM PDT by wildbill (The older I get, the less 'life in prison" means to me)
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To: Osage Orange
...I am corbfuesed

Cackle!

29 posted on 05/05/2020 12:20:47 PM PDT by HangnJudge (The Democratic Party is a Pandering Plutocracy)
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To: Vermont Lt
What I don’t understand is how selfish and down right stupid so many Freepers are.

And yet........here you are posting away.

30 posted on 05/05/2020 12:29:17 PM PDT by Balding_Eagle ( The Great Wall of Trump ---- 100% sealing of the border. Coming soon.)
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To: wildbill

As Mothers Day nears, I think we should be able to visit our moms and grandmothers in rest homes. We could stay 6 feet away..take temperatures..wear mask gloves..whatever..but many of us haven’t seen our Moms for months. I know many of the Moms do not understand why relatives don’t visit. This should end soon. It’s beginning to look cruel..


31 posted on 05/05/2020 5:18:52 PM PDT by alamogal (“I am the Government, and we are here to help..”)
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