The leader of the nation’s largest nursing home association expressed disappointment with the recent spike in COVID-19 cases at long-term care facilities after months of improvement. 

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living, said Wednesday during an interview with CNN Newsroom. 

“We had made tremendous progress in reducing the cases in long-term care facilities from the highs in March and April. We cut the number of cases per week in almost half and we cut the death rate over 70 percent,” he added. 

Pressure on PPE, testing 

Case numbers began to rise in June as states reopened and fewer people practiced social distancing, he said. The growth in cases then put stress on the demand for personal protective equipment and testing, he said. 

“In over 60 percent of the facilities today, you can test a resident or a staff member but you don’t get the results back for three or four days. In 25 percent of the cases, you don’t get it back for over five days,” he explained. 

“What we really need to happen is we need the case rates in the states that have had the spike to drop down, so that we can get the testing and get the equipment that we need in long-term care facilities.”

Parkinson called on all citizens to wear masks and socially distance to reduce case rates and for public officials to refocus their efforts on long-term care facilities. 

“When people are making a conscious decision to not wear a mask, they are making a decision that is killing old people in nursing homes. We need to take responsibility and change that,” Parkinson said. 

“Every governor needs to make a priority, particularly in these states with an exploding number of cases, to make sure that every long-term care facility has the N95 masks and the testing that they need. It’s the only way that we can bring these case counts down,” he added. 

Prioritizing elderly

Elderly citizens around the world have not been prioritized throughout the entirety of the pandemic, according to Parkinson. He added that it’s been “really despicable” to see what’s happened in long-term care facilities worldwide. 

A recent New York Times analysis found that many governments around the world failed to include nursing homes in emergency preparation plans during the beginning of the pandemic — creating deadly results for long-term care facilities.

“We just made some major policy mistakes that we need to make sure never happen again,” he said.