An outbreak of COVID-19 in Missouri’s veterans’ homes was inevitable.
The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged nursing homes across the country, with deaths piling up once the virus makes its way into a facility to attack the most vulnerable patients. What’s remarkable is that the outbreak in the seven such homes that house hundreds of Missouri veterans spread throughout the state took so long.
The first death came in the facility in north St. Louis County, early in the pandemic. But the folks at the Missouri Veterans Commission acted quickly, and there has been no major outbreak in St. Louis, where the COVID-19 restrictions are as strict as anywhere in the state.
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In late September, however, the news was not so good in Mount Vernon, in St. James, in Warrensburg and Cape Girardeau. Each of those facilities is with a dozen or more cases, and several deaths likely related to COVID-19.
The veterans homes share a common bond: They are in rural counties where there are few mask mandates or other pandemic restrictions. As of the first week of October, 57 veterans had COVID-19 in the Cape Girardeau Veterans Home, as did 12 staff members. There had been 21 deaths of veterans who had lived at the facility, though not all deaths necessarily can be attributed to the virus. The infection rate in Cape Girardeau County, a sign of the spread of COVID-19, is , an indicator that the virus is nowhere near under control there.
The story is similar in the Mount Vernon home in Lawrence County, and the St. James home in Phelps County, and the Warrensburg home in Johnson County. None of the counties have particularly stringent measures to counter COVID-19, following the lead of Gov. Mike Parson, who has refused to issue any statewide mandates. Each facility has staff members getting infected in their communities and bringing the virus into the nursing home where it is killing veterans.
When the spikes in the Missouri veterans homes were reported, Parson immediately . It happened right after he and his wife, Teresa, had become infected with COVID-19, focusing his campaign for governor against Democrat Nicole Galloway even more on the Republican’s actions, or inactions, during the pandemic.
Parson, who is a veteran, called the deaths and rise in cases in the veterans homes “unacceptable,†and he’s right.
But there has been another massive spike in COVID-19 cases going on even longer affecting people under the governor’s care — many of them also veterans — and he’s said nothing. For months, the state’s prison system has been undergoing massive waves of infection infecting both the people detained there and the staff members — among the lowest paid in the nation — who work there. So far this year, about 2,500 detainees in Missouri prisons have contracted COVID-19.
The state prison in Farmington is undergoing at least , with 300 detainees and 53 staff members infected. Since the pandemic began, there have been 481 detainees and 108 staffers infected at Farmington. Down the road, also in St. Francois County, the prison at Bonne Terre has 46 active detainee cases and nine staff members affected, bringing its total to 370 detainees infected since the pandemic began, and 103 staff members.
St. Francois County, just south of St. Louis, has one of the highest positivity rates in the state of Missouri, at 37 people per 1,000. It’s a chicken-and-egg question: Is the prison spike feeding the positivity rate, or is it because there is little mask wearing and social distancing in another rural county eschewing mandates and restrictions, continuing to believe that the more than 210,000 deaths nationwide are a hoax?
Missourians should not be surprised by COVID-19 spikes in institutions in rural areas, says Dave Dillon, the spokesman for the Missouri Hospital Association, which has been urging the governor to implement mask mandates and other pandemic restrictions.
“With the high infection rates statewide, smaller communities’ hospital and health care resources are reaching their capacity levels,†Dillon says. “When you look at where the patients are from, many are from outside of the community or even county where the hospital is located. While we can’t prove causation, it certainly correlates that these patients are from communities that have not put strict precautions in place for transmission like mask mandates or social distancing requirements.â€
In the women’s prison in Chillicothe, in Livingston County, more than 250 detainees have been infected since the beginning of the pandemic in a county with a 34 per 1,000 people positivity rate. There are or have been similar prison outbreaks in Moberly, in Vandalia, in Pacific and in Fulton.
Parson has said nothing about them, as though the people serving time in prison, many on probation violations, or nonviolent offenses, or drug charges, are all sent there on death sentences, to be locked away and forgotten about, not to mention the corrections employees and their families, and the people in the communities in which they live.
It’s good that Parson cares about the veterans being infected by COVID-19, but unfortunate that he doesn’t care enough about the other people in rural areas, including those behind bars, who continue to suffer from his lack of leadership amid this historic pandemic.
Where is the investigation for them?