How to fix a national embarrassment
COVID-19 has proven highly contagious and cruelly lethal for elderly patients−characteristics that seem specifically engineered to wreak havoc on nursing homes, as attested by worldwide mortality figures. Yet Canada’s experience has been “uniquely bad,” laments Michael Nicin, executive director of the National Institute on Ageing (NIA) at Toronto’s Ryerson University. “With 82 per cent of all COVID deaths in Canada occurring in long-term care homes, we are unfortunately leading the world in this regard.”