Nursing homes played with fire
Every entry in this series induces dread, anger, and sadness—all courtesy of COVID-19 town criers. And horror stories from as long as four years ago continue to be revealed by those who had to confront these events up close.
Someone who worked in the nursing home industry recently made an online post disclosing yet another outrage that we never even knew about before—and was never covered by any media source we know of. According to this account, many nursing homes required all belongings of deceased patients to be burned if the patient had COVID when they died, even if COVID was not the cause of death. This meant their loved ones could not retrieve these items. The items included jewelry, cash, family heirlooms, irreplaceable photos, and more.
At least that’s what the nursing homes say they did. Suspicion has been raised that they actually didn’t burn the belongings but instead stole and kept them. But burning the items would have been such a ghoulish act that why would anyone admit it if they didn’t do it? If they stole these things, it seems like the path of least resistance would have been to claim the items didn’t exist in the first place. It’s dishonest, evil, and surely illegal, but it would have been harder to prove the home was run by a bunch of thieves.
It appears that some nursing homes also cremated the deceased patients immediately after death—before families could even make funeral arrangements. As has been noted before, however, many jurisdictions did not even allow funerals. These jurisdictions included Italy, Ghana, New York state, and Washington state—just to name a few.
It is known that some theft did occur. A CBS piece from May 2020 said families of hospital patients who died of COVID discovered that belongings were stolen. A New Jersey hospital gave a family the wrong patient’s belongings. Gold necklaces and a century-old ring were stolen from other patients.
Schools committed child abuse under the guise of fighting COVID. There’s no disputing that. Similarly, nursing homes committed elder abuse under the same auspices. Now it turns out that some nursing homes and hospitals were run by grave robbers with no respect for patients’ belongings.