Coronavirus
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the problem for which Senator Casey asked unanimous consent, which is of the terrible plague of deaths in nursing homes across the country.
We just heard the chairman say that he is not sure what the air traffic controllers have to do with his proposal on school safety. I am not sure what his proposal on school safety has to do with nursing homes. We came here to talk about nursing homes.
There are over 30,000 residents of nursing homes in this country who have been killed by the COVID virus. If Senator Casey's numbers are accurate, that is another 20,000 of stats. It is one in four deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. Out of the 1.3 million Americans residing in nursing or intermediate care settings, 30,000-plus have passed away, and in some States, it is much worse.
Senator Hassan is here from New Hampshire, and she will talk about her State. Senator Casey is here from Pennsylvania.
In Rhode Island, 60 percent of our deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities. I know it is not just us but that it is going on around the country. One in five nursing homes nationwide has reported a COVID-related death, and as the disease explodes across parts of California, explodes across Florida, and explodes across Arizona, you know that this disease will have many more opportunities to attack many more Americans in many more nursing homes.
So our bill is a really sensible one: resources to nursing homes for staffing, for testing, for personal protective equipment, to support the expense of doing sensible things like cohorting--putting the COVID patients together to help contain the spread of the illness--and having surge teams available for the really dread situation in which the COVID sweeps through a facility with such ferocity that you can't get people to come and work there because they all have to be isolated and quarantined. You need special measures, special equipment, specially trained people--folks beyond the ordinary employee base of the facility--to come in and deal with that explosion, with things like just best practices--identifying them, promulgating them--practices that will keep residents and staff safe.
I am very disappointed that our Nursing Home COVID-19 Protection and Prevention Act has been objected to by the Senate majority. If the majority's notion is that we are doing so well that we can ignore this, that all we need to do is take a very close look at the funding that has already gone out, and that this is another victory we can declare-- mission accomplished; we are doing a wonderful job, Brownie; this is great--no, not with 30,000 fatalities and climbing.
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