I Say No, We’re Not OK: Message to ‘Higher Powers’ in Charge of Pandemic Response in NYC Nursing Home
Frustration is at an all time high amongst Coler’s nursing home residents during this coronavirus pandemic. Me, especially. I am a thirty-four-year-old quadriplegic black man. I am also a father, music producer, youth educator and a gun violence survivor. They say everyone has a voice but who can we really express our concerns to if someone in a higher power always denies the accusations.
In response to what Coler’s administration and Health + Hospitals’ CEO is saying, I say: No, we’re not ok. No, we’re not being protected the way we should be. For more than a month, I’ve been quarantined on a unit with residents who’ve tested positive, and only now, after weeks of leaving the infected in bedrooms with the non-infected, are they starting to separate us. But it doesn’t matter because the people who have the virus are still permitted to walk around the dayroom without masks and to use the same ice machine and microwave as everybody else.
There is a shortage of PPE and the higher power denies it. Why is that? Their job is to make sure that not only residents in the facility are protected but also the nurses and nurses aides that are caring for us, as well. Cross contamination is the main way a virus can spread from one resident to another. Why are nurses having to take care of a Covid patient then turn around and with the same gown on take care of a non-Covid patient? This is totally against NYS Health Department regulations. Again, the higher power denies this is going on. How will you really know if you’re in an office all day and never go on the units?
No communication between administration and residents at all, it’s like no one cares for our well being or how we feel.
Now we share space with Roosevelt Island Medical Center (RIMC), a temporary hospital that they set up inside Coler. At first, it was supposed to house patients with non-Covid health conditions in order to free up beds in the city’s acute hospitals for Covid patients. That decision changed on a dime, and of the 140 patients transferred to Coler nursing home, 104 of them have Covid. When asked they say RIMC is in a separate empty wing and on unused parts of the Coler campus that have been abandoned for more than a decade, but that’s not true at all. They’re one floor above me. It is very possible that germs can travel through vents or linger in elevators.
Sometimes I think that we’re being confined to our units to protect us from what they’re actually bringing in. The other day, after being on total lockdown for six weeks, I was escorted outside for ten minutes of fresh air, like I was back in jail and they were taking me to “the yard.” The front lobby security desk was enclosed in plexiglass and paramedics in hazmat-suit-looking gear were bringing patients in from ambulances.
When asked about the death count in late April, a number of six was given by H+H’s spin machine. But I can count ten on my double-unit of 50, alone, and there are another 10 double-units occupied by Coler residents. The same spokesperson for the corporation that runs Coler said that only 13 percent of us have it, but that’s bad math since they were only testing people who had strong symptoms, and before that no one was being tested.
As the days go by and more people test positive that didn’t have to if the higher power would have implemented proper procedures from the beginning, I ask myself how many more people have to get sick or die before someone higher than the higher power steps in and does what’s right.
