Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz faced fierce criticism for putting sick COVID patients into nursing homes during the height of the pandemic — even doubling down on his decision when the facilities accounted for a staggering 81% of his state’s pandemic deaths.
“This was not a mistake,” Minnesota’s governor said in May 2020, around the time that the North Star State had the highest percentage of COVID-19 deaths in long-term care facilities in the nation
“This was what everyone was doing,” he said of the nursing home policy similar to one partly behind the downfall of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“It wasn’t like no one thought about this. There was complexity in how you deal with this,” he said defensively in the face of severe criticism.
Early in the pandemic, more than 80% of the state’s COVID-19 deaths were among care-home residents — the highest of any state, according to analysis by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a nonprofit.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was among those warning that nursing-home populations were at increased risk of being infected by — and dying from — the coronavirus, with the sick and elderly most vulnerable.
However, Walz’s administration wanted to rush sick patients back to such homes, despite warnings that they did not allow safe distancing or the level of prevention needed, the Park Rapids Enterprise made clear at the time.
The policy has since been scrubbed from the public-facing Minnesota government website, according to Fox News, which used the Wayback Machine to find it. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Yuri Gripas - Pool via CNP/CNP / Polaris/Newscom |
The Minnesota governor actually defended the state's disastrous nursing home policies.
Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz was a moderate Democrat when he served in the House of Representatives but veered left during his two terms as governor. He referred to socialism as synonymous with neighborliness, pursued an extremely progressive governing agenda, and earned an F from the Cato Institute on fiscal policy.
Another notable thing about Walz is that he served as governor during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is thus possible to parse his approach to the virus—and that record is extremely disturbing. Indeed, Walz's coronavirus policies were extremely heavy-handed and restrictive; under his leadership, the state endured the pandemic in a fundamentally anti-libertarian fashion.
When the coronavirus was first spreading, Walz was an enthusiastic promoter of social distancing rules. He described the crowds in public, outdoor spaces as "a little too big." He even defended Minnesota's ridiculous hotline for COVID-19 snitches. That's right: Walz's government maintained a method for people to report their neighbors for failing to abide by social distancing rules. Walz insisted in a recent interview that "one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness"; denouncing one's neighbors as insufficiently loyal to government policies is a fundamental aspect of socialism, however.
When asked by Republicans to take down the hotline, Walz responded: "We're not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe."
And though Walz instructed police to merely issue citations to people caught violating stay-at-home orders—which is still bad enough—he also maintained the right, via executive order, to issue $1,000 fines and send violators to jail for 90 days. His government maintained that private, indoor gatherings should be limited to 10 people. Outdoor gatherings were arbitrarily capped at 25 people. On July 23, 2020, Walz declared a statewide mask mandate for most indoor spaces and even some outdoor spaces.
"If we can get a 90 to 95% compliance, which we've seen the science shows, we can reduce the infection rates dramatically, which slows that spread and breaks that chain," Walz said at the time. "This is the way, the cheapest, the most effective way for us to open up our businesses, for us to get our kids back in school, for us to keep our grandparents healthy and for us to get back that life that we all miss so much." --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
Growth from adversity: How older adults bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic
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