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This week returns us to Skilled Nursing and offers a look at successful efforts at protecting residents and slowing the momentum of facilities sliding toward closure and/or insolvency. We lead with a story about our firm as part of a team of employees, state and county regulators, vendors, the building’s landlord, and others who saved two skilled nursing facilities from closure. CalMatters’ in-depth and fascinating look at what went wrong, why, and the effort to save the Skilled Nursing Facilities offers insight into what tools are needed to stop so many from unnecessary closure. At the other end of the quality-of-care spectrum, Chaparral House, a Skilled Nursing Facility in Berkeley, California, has been to experts, regulators, and us a model of resident care and safety; we look at how they started letting family members back in while keeping Coronavirus out.  

Tragically, as I write this the day before we send Revitalize to you, today’s data illustrates that on July 20 there were just under 60,000 new cases in the U.S., the total number of new cases for the prior 7-days was 465,027. The total number of new cases for the prior 7-days in Germany was 3,382 and in Italy 1,394. In the second block we link to two articles on how the U.S. fell deeper and deeper into the Covid-19 pandemic and how Germany acted to limit its impact and emerge. Your curators very much believe that this data should encourage you to read these stories. This is Revitalize for July 22, 2020.
Revitalize: The week in health-care news you need
Resident care–safety and financial challenges that continue in skilled nursing:
With links to Seelig+Cussigh reports, underlying documents including court pleadings, information on parties involved, other reporting, and Yelp! reviews, CalMatters veteran health care Reporter Barbara Feder Ostrov offers a look at a failed provider and how state funds and a team of skilled professionals revitalized two about-to-be-closed Pasadena nursing homes in "The gathering storm: How the state seized control of two troubled nursing homes as Coronavirus crisis loomed."

Chaparral House has had one immediately controlled resident case of Covid-19 to-date, no infected workers, and did all the right things before and during the pandemic. It has opened the facility to visitors; an AP story that we caught in the LA Times gives you a look at what went right and the facility’s most effective, heroic even, Administrator KJ Page. Check out Page's work and the state of California nursing homes in "Amid pandemic, Californians can now visit relatives in nursing homes, but few are going."
A look at how self-interest and politics led to the failure of the White House to build and maintain a pandemic policy; a historical review of the U.S.'s far too limited Public Health programs and how our failure to understand the value of local public health effort hindered local and national public health workers and officials. A final link takes us to Munich to review what they did and how they are doing:

A NYTimes investigation offers us:“Inside the Failure: 5 Takeaways on Trump’s Effort to Shift Responsibility–President Trump and his top aides sharply shifted their pandemic strategy in mid-April after seizing on optimistic data suggesting the virus would disappear.” 

The NY Times both informs and analyzes and that brings us to their reporting: “The escalating crisis in Texas shows how the chronic underfunding of public health has put America on track for the worst coronavirus response in the developed world.

The New Yorker just posted a superb article linked below on how Medical researchers, clinicians, medical students, and citizens joined together to combat Covid-19. Read“How Munich Turned Its Coronavirus Outbreak Into a Scientific Study”
Jerry Seelig, CEO
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Fax: 310-841-2842