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.”
Inside the COVID-19 outbreak at Lakepointe nursing home in Clinton Township, Michigan
in an effort to expose dangerous conditions and save lives. To submit your own
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COVID-19 is out of control at Lakepointe Senior Care and Rehab Center in Clinton Township, Michigan. At least three residents at this Detroit-area nursing home have died from the disease since Christmas, and workers say that COVID-positive and negative residents are now being housed together in the same wings, and in some cases even the same rooms.
(Photo: Google maps, Aug 2019)
“We don’t have a medical team here for COVID, and our facility is not adequate to take care of COVID-positive residents,” said Jamie, a Lakepointe worker whose name has been changed to protect her from victimization. “We don’t have doctors, and we don’t have the right equipment. All we have are some oxygen tanks. We can’t take care of patients with COVID. They are just sitting here until they die.”