Here.
In November 2020 my mother was transferred to a nursing home from a hospital for physical therapy after having broken her leg. She was negative for COVID on the antibody test when she entered the hospital. Upon being screened for COVID at admission to the nursing home she tested positive for COVID on the newly implemented "gold standard" PCR test and was placed in the newly established COVID wing of the nursing home.
The nursing home had just switched to using the PCR test two days previously and had gone from 0 to 43 infected COVID patients instantly. The "good news" was that most of the patients in the COVID ward were asymptomatic. At least they were when they entered the ward.
The PCR employed by the nursing home in Nov 2020 used a cycle threshold of 40. Studies had already shown that 97% of positive PCR tests for COVID using a cycle threshold of >30 were false positives. In Dec 2020, the CDC changed the recommendation for PCR tests to use a cycle threshold of 20. No wonder the nursing home had 43 positive PCR tests for patients that had tested negative on the antibody test and were almost all asymptomatic By putting them in a ward together with one or two active symptomatic cases of COVID the PCR test was eventually proved correct after everyone in the ward became symptomatic.
Getting out of the COVID ward to resume PT was not easy. They would keep patients in that ward for a minimum of 20 days even after they were recovered from symptoms and probably not contagious. I'm sure that had nothing whatsoever to do with the thousands of dollars per patient paid to the nursing home under the CARES Act for housing COVID patients.
Mom spent the last six months of her life on the other side of glass from family. She suffered a rapid cognitive decline during COVID from which she never recovered. In these conditions of isolation she became listless and by February could not carry on a conversation on the phone and could not maintain eye contact during visits where she was sitting on the other side of a window from family. Most days she sat in a wheelchair next to the nurses station. Of course, she was vaccinated for COVID in February with all the other patients even though she had "recovered" from it back in early December.
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