Over the past year, as Heather Francis arrived at work each day, the beautiful view of The Creeks and Nantucket Harbor couldn’t negate her sense of dread. As the director of nursing at Our Island Home, Francis was charged with keeping Nantucket’s most vulnerable residents safe amid a pandemic that was proving deadly and devastating to nursing homes across the country. She was on pins and needles on a daily basis.
Our Island Home locked its doors to the outside world on March 9, 2020, barring visitors and volunteers in order to protect its residents from the novel coronavirus that was about to be unleashed upon the East Coast, and soon the entire country. Life changed drastically for everyone, of course, and inside Nantucket’s nursing home, Francis and the rest of the staff waged a nonstop effort to prevent an outbreak at the forty-five-bed facility.
The nation quickly learned that the virus was most lethal among the elderly, especially those living in close quarters at places like long-term-care facilities where it could spread easily among residents. But the scale of the tragedy that unfolded at nursing homes and long-term care facilities during the pandemic is staggering. Less than 1 percent of America’s population lives in such facilities, but yet they account for 34 percent of U.S. COVID-19 deaths, according to The Atlantic magazine’s COVID Tracking Project. Nationwide, nearly 175,000 nursing home residents have died as a result of the virus. The losses were even more pronounced in Massachusetts, where more than half of all COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing homes.
And yet Our Island Home, which has the distinction of being Massachusetts’ only municipally owned and operated nursing home, has emerged essentially unscathed from the pandemic, with nothing short of a miraculous record of keeping its patients and staff safe from the virus. Not a single patient at Our Island Home has died from COVID-19. There was not even one infection among its residents. Just a single staff member tested positive for the virus, and that person was quickly isolated and recovered without spreading the disease to anyone at the facility.
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Source: N Magazine
