hospital beds for COVID-19 patients of all
stripes by letting nursing home residents
complete their recovery elsewhere, but with
medical supervision.
Additionally, all residents whose nursing homes
are being turned into recovery centers will be
temporarily quarantined in their new spaces in
case they aren’t sick but have the virus anyway.
But that requires uprooting people who might
be fragile, even without having the virus, and
plopping them into an unfamiliar setting.
“We all know that a lot of seniors, whether
they have end-stage dementia or not, they can
get confused very often,” said Lisa Warzecha,
of Middletown, Connecticut, whose 89-year-
old grandmother lives in a nursing home in
Cromwell that hasn’t had a COVID-19 case. “And
if they’re sick, in particular, they’re really going to
be confused or frightened, and they’re going to
wake up and have all these machines on them
possibly, and new nursing staff.”
Warzecha said she can see benefits on both
sides, but Brent Colley, an elected official
in Sharon, Connecticut, where the 88-bed
Sharon Health Care Center was converted
into the state’s first COVID-19 recovery center,
objected outright.
“Moving residents out of their home/care facility
is wrong and places these individuals at risk; it
disrupts their care; places them in a mindset of
confusion, possibly depression; it also affects
their care-givers in similar, although different
ways,” he wrote on social media.
Sharon’s owner, Athena Health Care Systems,
has agreed to transform another home in