Coronavirus Kills Over 100,000 in Nursing Homes — What Happened?

 Elaine Ryan: We went from long-term care to long-term calamity in a few months in this country. Lori Porter: CNAs feared for their lives for $13 an hour. Lori Spencer: Here's my mother, just thinking about getting a cold, and I'm thinking about COVID-19. Nancy Butner: The staff loss, the resident loss, it was next to impossible to manage an invisible virus. Bill Sweeney: This isn't just about coronavirus. This is shining a light on a broken nursing home industry that has had these problems for years. Lori Spencer: Prior to going the Life Care Center, we watched the news. We were very well aware that there was a virus that had broken out in Wuhan, China, but never associating it having landed here in the Seattle area. So, it was not on our radar. ABC News Reporter: And it's not just China. Since the virus first appeared in the central Chinese city of Wuhan last month, it has spread into neighboring countries. Anthony Fauci, M.D.: Right now in the United States, the situation still is a low risk for the American public. But then again, that could change.

Lori Spencer: We chose the Life Care Center because it had five stars. We checked my mom in at 2 o'clock on the Wednesday of the 26th for a short rehabilitative stay, so we thought. And that was the day we started our biggest battle of our lifetimes. Nancy Butner: We were notified on February 28th, 2020, that we had a diagnosed patient at Life Care Center of Kirkland. KING Reporter: We know of two people here who tested positive for coronavirus.

One is a health care worker in her 40s, the other is a patient in her 70s. Nancy Butner: I knew that it was a significant concern to have COVID in our facility. There's a lot of things that we monitor for in long-term care. The flu is certainly one of them. This was far above that. We knew nothing about asymptomatic spread. We had no means of testing. Lori Spencer: Saturday morning we got a call from the Life Care Center saying two people had been identified as having that virus. And they told us at that time that they were going into lockdown. No visits were allowed. I was devastated. I got in the car and drove up there, hoping to pull my mom out. ABC News Reporter: The CDC's screening thousands of passengers arriving from Wuhan. Seema Verma: We weren't getting a lot of information out of China, unfortunately. That turning point in all of this, especially when it came to nursing homes, was that weekend in Seattle where we had the Kirkland facility. I remember I called the vice president's office, and we were sort of filled with this sense of urgency.

Nancy Butner: We knew we didn't have the PPE we needed. Staff had been calling off because they were sick. Patients would be OK, and then within a couple hours they would be unresponsive or having difficulty breathing. And those first few days, we were sending patients out to the hospital at an extremely rapid pace. NBC News Reporter: Tonight, nursing homes across the country scrambling to increase safety protocols. Lori Porter: It started going south immediately, simply because of staffing shortages and a lack of protective equipment. Certified nursing assistants started contacting us for any type of advice or guidance, and the fear grew very quickly.

Danielle Ivory: We started literally with a spreadsheet. No one else was tracking this at a national level at that point. We went to every state, we filed public records requests asking to confirm the numbers of cases and deaths. Seema Verma: With nursing homes, there's a level of complexity. We were sending out supplies. We were giving them testing guidance. But what we found a lot of times was that the staff didn't understand exactly how to use the protective equipment. Lori Porter: Sometimes you would get things that didn't even resemble PPE. One of our members received condoms from FEMA as PPE. Frankly, nursing homes were treated less than hospitals. We were the stepchild, so to speak, of health care and we didn't get the PPE first. We didn't get the information, the testing that was needed in any infection, pandemic or not. Lori Spencer: Originally, you were not allowed to be tested unless you were exhibiting symptoms of coronavirus.

If I did pull my mother from the Life Care Center, there wouldn't be anywhere for me to take her because she was now exposed and she needed medical care. She called me the morning of the 10th and she told me she was sick. She was coughing. She was saying, "I'm freezing. I need my tea. I need some cough drops. Please go get me those things so I can nip this in the bud." I'm calling around saying, "My mom's sick, what can you tell me?" A nurse said, "Your mom's positive." Elaine Ryan: In March we closed the colleges, we ended sporting events, we stopped the theaters, with the exception of the greatest, most vulnerable congregate setting of them all, nursing homes.

You know, that speaks to me about a fundamental disregard for our seniors in this country. President Trump: To unleash the full power of the federal government with this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency. Seema Verma: Well, thank you to the president for the declaration. It allows my agency, CMS that runs Medicare and Medicaid and has oversight of all of the nation's health care facilities, to suspend regulations that could get in the way of treating patients. Some of the very early actions that the agency talk and the administration was to say, we need to close nursing homes to visitors. It was heart-wrenching for us, knowing that we were separating people from seeing their loved ones in the nursing homes. And then, the longer it went on just recognizing the toll that it was taking. Allison Lolley: We got our first notification mid-March that we were not allowed to come in at all. We made adjustments to visit Mother from the window. While she was wheelchair bound, her mind was sharp as a tack. KPTV Reporter: A veteran from an Oregon nursing home died today from COVID 19. He was one of 14 cases at that facility.

WNBC Reporter: There is an urgent move underway in Woodbridge, New Jersey. A nursing home is being evacuated due to an outbreak of coronavirus. Danielle Ivory: I ended up on the phone with a manager at a nursing home right outside of New Orleans. And she was just really at the edge of despair. And she said that the hospital, it was so busy that it was not going to take any of the residents, even though she felt that some of them were going to die over the next night. Lori Porter: It was a nightmare because our members were laundering their PPE. They would turn bandanas into masks. Trash bags were being augmented, cut, slit, stripped, put on. They MacGyver-ed the PPE to protect themselves the best they could. Seema Verma: Today, we are announcing that we are requiring nursing homes to report to patients and their families if there are cases of COVID virus inside the nursing home.

Allison Lolley: I learned about the first case on April the 17th. I received a letter in the mailbox and it noted that an employee in the facility had tested positive for COVID, and I learned that it was my mother's nurse. Mother was trapped in a facility, in a petri dish, and we were locked out and watching through the window. Bill Sweeney: Over 6,000 people reached out to AARP, sharing their stories, which were truly horrific. And we shared those with policymakers to make sure that those families had their voices heard. Rep. James E. Clyburn: I would like to recognize now Ms. Lolley for an opening statement. Allison Lolley: We decided to keep Mama in the Oaks as long as there were no more cases. We began to see vacillating practices by the staff and Mama began to look disheveled. I spoke with every resource I had within the Oaks facility regarding their lack of communication. President Trump: I guess you could call it a little bit of a weak spot because things are happening at the nursing homes and we're not happy about that.

We don't want it to happen. CBS News Reporter: The nursing home industry is now seeking immunity from lawsuits tied to the outbreak. At least 15 states have passed laws offering some legal protection. Elaine Ryan: All I have to say is, my God. While we knew that people were perishing in nursing homes, they were dying at rates we had never seen before. The nursing home industry was going state to state to try to absolve themselves of liability.

Kristen Knapp: We are looking for immunity essentially because we want them to be able to focus on care for their residents without the threat of being sued. Gov. Phil Murphy: I am also outraged that bodies of the dead were allowed to pile up in a makeshift morgue at the facility. We can and must do better. Elaine Ryan: Many of the nursing home facilities in this country are corporately owned. So when you send billions of dollars down directly into entities, did the money go to the corporate owners? This lack of accountability is key because if we're still getting reports of low staffing and poor PPE access and no testing, the question is, where did that money go? Danielle Ivory: We found that nursing homes with significant black and Latino populations, 25 percent or more, were twice as likely to be hit with a coronavirus outbreak than their white counterparts.

Danielle Ivory: A white nursing home with one star from the federal government— so the worst rating that you can get— was still less likely to have a coronavirus outbreak than a black nursing home that had five stars. Allison Lolley: I got a phone call from the nursing home. They were immediately transferring her to the local hospital. Our brother and I had a 5 or 10 minute conversation with her before they put her in the ambulance, and those were our last real words with Mom. They made the decision to move her to the COVID unit and she went into ICU that evening. She died six days later at 5:05 p.m. WPMT Reporter: Critics say more needs to be done to stem the loss of life in long-term care facilities. Lori Porter: More than anything, a CNA tries to protect the quality of life and the dignity of those they serve. As spring turned to summer, fatigue had set in. The nursing homes had been ravaged by COVID. It became the most dangerous job in America. Bill Sweeney: Before the pandemic, 8 out of 10 nursing homes aren't following basic infection control practices. And so, I do think that we need to continue to raise alarms.

You need to continue to demand action to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. Nancy Butner: I look back on that time, and I am so proud of the staff. We cleared COVID and we considered all patients and all staff recovered at Life Care Center of Kirkland. I think that was the best thing of all, to survive it. Lori Spencer: My mom maintained hope throughout this entire ordeal, and fortunately, she's a survivor. We were extremely grateful that we had the ability to take my mother home because many others didn't. When I thought I had failed my mother, I think actually we succeeded in the end, both of us. Allison Lolley: The industry as a whole is flawed. There are underpaid, underexperienced staffers who are charged with tremendous responsibility for caring for others.

COVID shined a bright light on the severity of that issue. We must reform the industry. We must properly fund it, because I'm not going to sit back and allow my mother to die in vain..