DBusiness Magazine
System Failure
The mission of senior care facilities to ease residents’ twilight years turned into a nightmare after state leaders failed to adequately separate COVID-19 patients from healthy individuals.
When COVID-19 started roiling through nursing homes last winter, Cecelia Payne had more
at stake than most. And her worst fears soon became reality. Her husband, Arnold Brown, 78, died of COVID-19 on April 24, 2020, at McLaren Macomb Hospital in Mt. Clemens after being transferred there from the Martha T. Berry Medical Care Facility.
Brown, a former manufacturing tooling engineer before a stroke disabled him, had been in the Mt. Clemens skilled nursing facility since 2006. His roommate at the medical care facility died, as well. “I really do feel that he got it from a staff member,” Payne, of Macomb Township, says of her husband’s illness. “Especially when I learned his roommate had it, too.”