Now not time to relax rules for nursing homes
Richard Mollot is right ["State looking at easing laws on nursing homes," March 29]. I have worked in local nursing homes all over Northwest Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma for the last 24 years. I can affirm that nursing homes in our state have always been shorthanded with the existing minimum staffing requirements, even with only one person absent. To reduce the number of staff in any nursing home at this time would could spell disaster.
The folks in nursing homes deserve better-than-ever care, not lay offs and less care. These people have contributed to our society throughout their lives, raised families and paid taxes. How would you want your own parents treated if they ever needed nursing home care. Now is the time to provide more help for those in need. How could anyone even think of relaxing standards of inspection and infection control. It is bad enough that the doors are closed to all visitors.
Let's not repeat the disaster of leaving patients to die alone, such as what happened in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Joyce Murray
Springdale
Lost time with people may have lasting effect
I recognized today there is one upside to enduring the current coronavirus currently attacking America and our way of life. Sure, it is fully a heartwrenching time for all of us, but I have also realized there is at least one indisputable upside and broad societal benefit that will come from its ravaging of our people and this quite small Earth.
The greatest joy of my wife Linda's and my lives since our respective retirements several years ago (she was a math teacher and I an attorney) has been the regular face-to-face love, interaction and camaraderie with our children and grandchildren and with new and old dear friends, though our children and five granddaughters live in "distant land," i.e., Little Rock and Houston! But, obviously, the danger being posed to each of us by the virus has made it dangerous, and truly irrational, for there to be any hugging or face-to-face interaction with either of our children or any our five granddaughters. I cannot tell you how awkward and, in part, sad it was this afternoon to be forced to visit with a friend while he was at one end of his driveway and I at the other.
But as I was mowing the yard the other day, it struck me there is at least one positive thing from all of the tragedy caused by the virus. It has made me, and I am certain many folks, truly long to see family and so many of our friends again -- up close and personal, as opposed to using the iPhone, email or whatever other "new age" contraptions that have come to permeate our society.
And that "upside" is simply that this horrible state of affairs has reaffirmed the value and true joy of family and friends for each and every one of us! As a result, my anxiousness for an answer to covid-19, even though it was already vast, has seemingly grown many-fold.
It is sometimes amazing and rewarding to think what may come to one's mind just from pushing a bumping, jiggling little lawnmower.
Don Switzer
Rogers
Commentary on 03/31/2020