CBC News compares how Australian long-term care facilities are run and regulated with Ontario’s system. Canada had 6000 deaths in long-term care facilities and Australia had 29 during the same period(March-May, 2020)
“A Time of Fear”, a report prepared by Mario Possamai, former senior advisor to the Ontario government’s SARS Commission.
Chapter 4, “Long-Term Care in Canada and COVID-19: They Deserve Better
“As of early September 2020, COVID-19 had taken the lives of more than 7,000 seniors in long-term care facilities and 16 long-term care staff (80% of Canada’s deaths). In June 2020, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reported that Canada’s COVID-19 mortality rate in long-term care was the highest among all OECD countries and almost double the OECD average (42 per cent).”
“Health care workers in the LTC sector remain the underpaid, underprotected, under-re- sourced, undertrained, understaffed and underappreciated lynchpins who have held together a fractured, broken system that has been decaying for decades under successive governments, whatever the political stripe.”
http://www.thetyee.ca/Documents/2020/12/22/ATimeOfFearReport.pdf
Following are some quotes from the transcript of the “Coronavirus Town Hall” on Dec 3 hosted by Dr Sanjay Gupta and Anderson Cooper that are very concerning.
“Why vaccinate our most frail? Odd vote out shows the dilemma”
The vote to recommend long-term care residents be among the first to receive Covid-19 vaccinations was not unanimous. Out of a panel of 14 CDC vaccine advisers, a lone doctor said no. Talbot was worried about whether the vaccine would even work in such frail, vulnerable patients. Even more, she worried about how it might look if the vaccine failed in that group, or how it would affect public perception if residents died soon after getting the vaccine.
“The Covid-19 vaccines have not been tested in the frail elderly, many of whom are residents of long-term care facilities.”
“Since they haven’t been studied in people in those populations, we don’t know how well the vaccine will work for them. We know that most vaccines don’t work nearly as well in a frail elderly person as they would in someone who is fit and vigorous, even if they happen to be the same age,” Moore said.
“There’s a question about the direct benefit of the vaccine, if given to people who live in those facilities, because we haven’t studied how well it works in that group yet.”
“I have spent my career studying vaccines in older adults. And we have traditionally tried a vaccine in a young healthy population and then hoped it works in our frail older adults,” she told the committee ahead of her vote. “And so we enter this realm of ‘we hope it works, and we hope it’s safe,’ and that concerns me on many levels.”
“We would not at all be surprised to see, coincidentally, vaccination happening and then having someone pass away a short time after they receive a vaccine, not because it has anything to do with the vaccination but just because that’s the place where people at the end of their lives reside,” Moore said.”
Source of transcript: https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_f57704265a0db9708053b6eb5320dd44
I guess is what the CDC panel of doctors in the interview above meant…
Nursing home in New York had a new outbreak one week after vaccinations. 80% of residents and about 1/2 of the workers were vaccinated. 137 infected and 24 died.
New York Post: 23 die in Norway after receiving Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine
Truth Over Fear 