the staff of the Ridgewood blog
River Vale NJ, Assemblywomen Holly Schepisi : “Since March I’ve been banging a drum about our failures to protect our most vulnerable residents in our Long Term Care Facilities. I started reaching out to the Governor’s office and the Department of Health in late March to ask for assistance and provide suggestions regarding outbreaks that were starting to occur in Bergen and Passaic based facilities. I offered up suggestions such as closing the FEMA testing sites for several days to mandatorily test staff and personnel at the facilities. I begged them to allocate some PPE to the facilities. I offered medically trained professionals to assist with contact tracing. And I warned that unless we took immediate action we would see outbreaks throughout every facility in the State.”
“Unknown to me at this time was the fact that the State Department of Health had just drafted a memo that was being sent to every long term care operator in the State mandating they MUST take COVID positive patients into their facilities and were PROHIBITED from testing them before they came in. After the massive number of deaths in these facilities the State has now turned around and pointed its finger at the owners and operators of these facilities calling them “bad actors”.
Late last week I met with one of these owners who provided me with a taped conference call held between the Department of Health and the Long Term Care Facilities in March 31. During this call the owners expressed their deep concerns about the State’s policy and specifically stated that if the State forced this policy many people were going to die. The very next day I had a similar call with the Governor’s Office and Commissioner of Health but this policy was never disclosed to us as members of the legislature.
The State ignored these concerns.
The State forced COVID positive patients into facilities that had no cases.
The State refused to assist in providing PPE.
The State knew these facilities had no means of separating staff and infected patients from those not infected.
Many of our most vulnerable died and accurate numbers have not been shared.
We need a full criminal investigation into these deaths. FULL STOP.”