The “Old Age in Joy” Foundation warned of the threat of mass infections of COVID-19 in social institutions across the country

Director of the “Old Age in Joy” Foundation Elizaveta Oleskina, using the example of the Vyazemsky boarding home for the elderly and disabled, explained on Facebook what social institutions are facing during the coronavirus pandemic. She warned of the threat of mass infections among nursing home residents and staff across the country unless urgent action is taken.

As Oleskina reported, on April 15, ten more residents of a nursing home where an outbreak of COVID-19 occurred were hospitalized with high fever. Four were taken to the local Vyazemskaya Central District Hospital, six more people, three of whom had limited mobility, were taken to the Smolensk hospital, which was more than two and a half hours away, but “the equipment there is better.” An employee of the boarding school was also sent to Smolensk with the patients.

“We will try to provide at least some kind of care and support for these people,” Oleskina wrote. “They are family to us.” Those who are sick, frightened by the confusion of recent days, by the fact that “the virus is especially dangerous for the elderly,” by the fact that the end of the world is taking place in the boarding school, neighbors nearby are getting sick. And we understand too well what awaits them in the hospital. And before the virus, there was no [specialized] care [for the elderly and people with disabilities] in hospitals in the country, and now there is nowhere to get it.”

Oleskina emphasized that it was not possible to organize anti-epidemic measures in the Vyazma nursing home immediately after the first case of infection was detected - on April 10. Only six days later did the military put up a tent under the sanitary checkpoint, and before that there was no clean area in the boarding school, said the head of the foundation. In order to get a tent, according to Oleskina, she had to “scream into the phone for several days.” Moreover, in the five days since the discovery of the virus, “one nurse and three orderlies were left from the staff,” and the fund “produced manually throughout the whole world” for four days, with the help of regional and federal authorities.

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Oleskina recalled the shortage of staff in social institutions, and that there is nowhere to get reinforcements - they can only be transferred from home-based services, where workers are already “torn to pieces, barely coping”: “The volume of work has increased significantly. And the social service staff are a third elderly people. Many of them have already had to isolate themselves.”

The head of the fund said that all boarding schools in the country urgently need to recruit additional staff for preventive 14-day isolation, guarantee wages, provide them with chemical protection, disinfectants, medicines, food, water, communication with the outside world and access to psychological help.

“I want us to stop trying to hush up the truth. So that the bitter experience of the disaster in Vyazma will help others make the right decisions from the very beginning. <…> We have more than one and a half thousand institutions in the country. We will kill too many people if we don't act now. <…> I really hope that today the regions where there are tests for the virus in nursing homes and nursing homes have already been done, will begin to speak for themselves,” Oleskina emphasized.

On April 15, the first resident of the Vyazemsky boarding home for the elderly and disabled, where the coronavirus was discovered, died. The man was 74 years old; it was previously established that he died from cardiovascular failure. The number of identified cases of coronavirus infection in this boarding home reached 83. On the same day, quarantine was introduced in the Smolensk region.

On April 14, 21 people with COVID-19 were hospitalized from the boarding school, and hospitalization was being prepared for another 10 people. On April 10, one of the boarding school employees tested positive for coronavirus. He was isolated and placed under medical observation. 250 people lived in the boarding school, 100 of them with limited mobility.