Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am honored to follow my colleagues Senators Shaheen and Hassan from New Hampshire and Senator Whitehouse of my neighboring State of Rhode Island--great advocates and steadfast champions of our elderly, our nursing home and assisted living facilities, and, most important, my wonderful friend and colleague, Senator Casey of Pennsylvania, who has been such a tremendous champion as the ranking member on the Aging Committee, where I am also privileged to serve.

I have been reading about the 1918, 1919 pandemic which killed Americans and people all around the world with such terror and such relentless cruelty, and it hit particularly hard young people in the prime of their life, in their twenties and early thirties, most especially members of the military who were bunked together and confined on bases or on troop ships on their way to the war. Almost as many American troops died of disease during World War I as they did of wounds they suffered in combat.

Today's pandemic is different. It has hit particularly hard our elderly, and they too have been struck with vicious cruelty because, in many instances, they are confined to facilities or living spaces where they are together, and the disease is transmitted so efficiently.

Today, we have less excuse than the public officials a century ago. They had no idea what this organism looked like, how it lived, what it did, or how it was transmitted. We know. We have pictures of it. They are on the news every night, and we know that transmission is accelerated and exacerbated when people live together in close confinement without the kind of staff and protective gear and treatment and therapeutics and preventive measures that, hopefully, we will develop through research that is ongoing right now.

They had no cure, and they had no prevention back then. We are working to develop it now, but we know, in the meantime, steps can be taken to protect our elderly, especially our elderly who live in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

We have no excuse, none, for the death rates we have seen in those facilities. In fact, at the height of this pandemic in Connecticut, 70 percent--literally, 7 in 10--deaths were among people in nursing homes and other senior care facilities. That percentage was among the highest in the country. It wasn't the 80 percent of New Hampshire, but 70-plus percent was among the highest.

This death rate nationally is a national scandal and disgrace because we knew enough, and we certainly now know enough to prevent these kinds of deaths.

Now, the numbers of COVID cases and deaths have slowed down in Connecticut as a result of social distancing and mandatory mask wearing, but the pain is still felt in nursing homes. Just last week, another 20 nursing home residents died, and in that same week, 64 nursing home staff contracted COVID-19.

In fact, although we talk about the residents of nursing homes, the staff--the doctors, the nurses, the clinicians, the caregivers, the maintenance workers--were also among the most heavily impacted. Working in a nursing home is not a picnic. Working in a nursing home is tough physically and emotionally, and it was made all the more so by this pandemic.

That is why I am supporting, avidly, the Heroes Fund, part of the Heroes Act, which would provide hazardous duty pay to those frontline workers who have been on the job reporting for duty despite the risk and the extraordinary emotional and physical toll it has taken on them and their families.

That hazardous duty pay is a reward. It is a recognition for what they have done in service to not only their patients and clients but also to society in Connecticut as a whole. They deserve it, and we need to provide it to retain them and to recruit others, the same as we do for police and fire and first responders--others who work in grocery stores, supermarkets, delivering, postal workers--the unsung heroes of this pandemic.

None has been more courageous and perhaps less appreciated in the way they deserve than those strong and courageous workers in nursing homes in Connecticut and elsewhere. I know, from having talked to them--many of them in Zoom calls, personally, in meetings, on the telephone--they grieved for those losses. They genuinely felt the pain and suffering that they saw. The losses the families suffered were their losses, too, and when their facilities endured a higher than expected rate of fatality, they grieved along with brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, friends, family, and others. They experienced the kind of physical isolation and sometimes emotional isolation that those patients endured when they were separated from their loved ones, cut off from human contact.

So we need to focus--we have an obligation to do so--on our nursing homes because of the fatalities and the other suffering that is endured there. We need to learn from some of the best practices that were finally put into place in Connecticut, such as expert strike teams that focused on testing, the larger numbers of personal protective equipment--masks, gowns, other kinds of equipment necessary to protect the staff as well as the residents--and sometimes cohorting, which has worked in some circumstances, so that the infected are separated from others.

I am proud to support Senator Casey in fighting for the Nursing Home COVID-19 Protection and Prevention Act, which would provide $20 billion in emergency funding specifically targeted toward protecting nursing home residents as well as individuals in intermediate-care facilities and others in psychiatric hospitals.

This legislation is not a luxury or convenience; it is a necessity. If you care about those extraordinarily vulnerable individuals who cannot care for themselves--that is why they are in these facilities-- then we must pass this legislation. If we have any measure of self- respect as well as regard for those brave individuals who work there and the loved individuals who live there, we must take this step.

I have also introduced legislation with Senator Booker--the Quality Care for Nursing Home Residents and Workers During COVID-19 Act--that would immediately address the egregious number of nursing home deaths happening in Connecticut and throughout the country by implementing much needed reforms. These reforms and practices are part of the work that must be done, especially for the families of the over 2,500 nursing home residents who lost their lives.

I am pleased that Connecticut has committed itself to a full probe of how COVID-19 impacted nursing homes, how it killed, but Connecticut should not need to go it alone. No State should need to go it alone. This kind of measure puts the full weight of the Federal Government in funding and best practices and reforms behind States like Connecticut that want to do better and feel we must do better. We all bear that responsibility. It is common to all of us. It is on us, and these two measures are a way to fulfill that responsibility.

We should not leave the Capitol for a 2-week recess while nursing home residents remain vulnerable. We should not abdicate our responsibility while those residents in the care of assisted living facilities remain susceptible, and they are continuing to be susceptible. We need greater preparedness in every way, most especially where we know the most vulnerable are right now, and that is our nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

As this administration continues to attack the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court of the United States and elsewhere in abhorrent defiance of the need for more healthcare, not less, in the midst of a pandemic, we can send a message to the country that we will stand strong for better healthcare. We will protect senior citizens in nursing homes.

Thank you.

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