There is so much WTF in this story that it is unimaginable. 68 deaths in one place and it went unnoticed including 2 of the nurses. They were tipped off to the whole thing because they moved a body into a shed? This needs to be investigated. Emphasis added below for heaps of WTF.
NY Times
The call for body bags came late Saturday.
By Monday, the police in a small New Jersey town had gotten an anonymous tip about a body being stored in a shed outside one of the state’s largest nursing homes.
When the police arrived, the corpse had been removed from the shed, but they discovered 17 bodies piled inside the nursing home in a small morgue intended to hold no more than four people.
“They were just overwhelmed by the amount of people who were expiring,” said Eric C. Danielson, the police chief in Andover, a small township in Sussex County, the state’s northernmost county.
The 17 were among 68 recent deaths linked to the long-term care facility, Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center I and II, including two nurses, officials said. Of those who died, 26 people had tested positive for the virus.
For the others, the cause of death is unknown.
Of the patients who remain at the homes, housed in two buildings, 76 have tested positive for the virus; 41 staff members, including an administrator, are sick with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to county health records shared on Wednesday with a federal official.
Andover Subacute is not alone. The coronavirus has swept through the New York region’s nursing homes with devastating and deadly speed, killing thousands of residents at facilities struggling with staff shortages, increasingly sick patients and a lack of personal protective gear.
But with beds for 700 patients, Andover Subacute is, records show, the state’s largest licensed facility — and the risk of continued spread is terrifying to family members who have turned to social media and their local congressman, desperate for answers and extra personnel.
“The challenge we’re having with all of these nursing homes, is once it spreads, it’s like a wildfire,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat who got the call on Saturday, asking for body bags. “It’s very hard to stop it.”
One of the owners of the facility, Chaim Scheinbaum, did not return calls or emails. Staff members who answered phones at the facilities said they were not authorized to speak to the news media.
Even before the pandemic, the nursing home had struggled. Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation II recently got a one-star rating of “much below average” from Medicare for staffing levels, inspections and patient care.
