Still Not Enough PPE

PPE or personal protective equipment is still lacking in nursing homes. Throughout the pandemic, nursing homes are hotspots for the virus. Nursing home residents and employees are a large percentage of the deaths. However, caregivers still warn they don’t have proper protective equipment.

Chaundra Kidd is a nursing assistant at Cityview Healthcare and Rehabilitation in Ohio. “If you’re going to work on the COVID unit, you may not even have all the essentials that you need to work on that unit,” Kidd said. “You got to go scrounge around trying to find the PPE. There’s just not enough of everything, period.”

AARP published a recent study of data that showed 34 percent of Ohio nursing homes had only a one-week supply of personal protective equipment for their workers.

Nationally, long-term care facilities account for about 8 percent of all cases of the coronavirus, but 40 percent of all deaths in the U.S., according to analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation in October.