With four dead and two dozen sickened, Hollywood's century-old facility for the elderly fights both COVID-19 and residents' quarantined loneliness in 'the biggest challenge the home has ever seen'
), 80-year-old character actor Allen Garfield and Ann Sullivan, 91, a long-tenured animator at Disney. Residents under treatment mostly reside in a dedicated 18-bed wing on the property and a few with acute needs at nearby West Hills Hospital. In addition, nine staff members have tested positive.
The MPTF’s outbreak arose in its long-term and memory care wards, where the activities of daily life require staffers to make frequent and direct contact with residents. “The reality is that we can quarantine our residents and we can’t quarantine our staff: They go to other jobs and they go home,” says Beitcher, explaining that care personnel make their living through shift work at multiple facilities. “Sooner or later, the law of probability takes effect.
According to Beitcher, the MTPF is able to navigate the financial burden of the crisis. However, a key challenge is simply fielding enough personnel to respond to it. “I have some people who have already tested positive and can’t work and others who might be perfectly happy to do this kind of work under normal circumstances but when you say ‘COVID-19’ they won’t because of the risk to themselves and their families,” he explains.
MPTF residents are practiced in quarantining for short periods — a few days or even a week — to stem periodic campus outbreaks of influenza or gastroenteritis. They find diversion in Turner Classic Movies and FaceTime with their loved ones.
In 2017, Dr. Scott Kaiser, the MPTF’s chief innovation officer and a specialist in geriatric medicine, launched a volunteer phoning initiative. He’d come upon research which indicated that loneliness is, as he puts it, “the greatest risk factor of all” for elderly health, as well as “the biggest predictor in terms of early mortality.
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