RIGHT SPEAK: Secure the Nursing Homes, Not the Beaches: Most New Deaths are from Nursing Homes

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What if our government expended all our national funding, resolve, regulations, and resources pushing a quarantine of healthy people with less than a 0.1% fatality rate and then left nursing homes – the main target of COVID-19’s deadly reach – completely exposed?

Part of why it’s so important for the government to stop lying to people about the risk of death for younger and healthier people is not just to get our lives and economy moving again, but to more effectively and efficiently train our resources and focus on those who truly are in danger. Now it appears that some of the governors who were most concerned with expending money and resources to lock down an entire nation, including people with a very low fatality rate, failed to properly secure the nursing homes.

One peculiar observation about the death count is that the number of deaths continues to skyrocket, even as hospitalizations have long since peaked and everyone agrees the curve has been bent. The main argument of the pro-lockdown crowd is only concerning what might happen if lockdown is ended. So why are the deaths still going up, and where are they coming from?

At the same time, as I document the percentage of states’ total COVID-19 fatalities that come from nursing homes, I’ve noticed that the percentage seems to be rising nearly every day in many states. One would expect the percentage to remain relatively the same. If nursing homes account for half the deaths, all things equal, that trend should hold. I don’t have screenshots of state dashboards on this particular data point tracked by day, but we can go back in time to some reporters or commentators who did and track the growth.

Consider the following:

Massachusetts: On April 16, I used data culled from databases by Phil Kerpen, who found that in Massachusetts, “530 COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents, 47.8% of the state’s total reported 1108 deaths.” The number was 56% on April 24 and 59% on May 4, which means a disproportionate share of the recent increase was from nursing homes.
Pennsylvania: On the same day, Kerpen reported that “Pennsylvania reports 365 COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents, 51.6% of the state’s total reported 707 deaths.” Local media reported that number had risen to 61% as of April 26. Then, as of noon on May 5, it was 67.3%.
New Jersey: On April 17, Bloomberg reported that nursing home deaths were 39.8% of New Jersey’s total count. As of May 5, it was 50%.
Minnesota: --->