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Seventy veterans have died and another 80 residents and 81 staff gave tested positive<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
BBC<\/p>\n
Seventy veterans living in a care home in the US state of Massachusetts have died after contracting coronavirus, officials said.<\/strong><\/p>\n The outbreak is the deadliest reported in a long-term care home in the US.<\/p>\n A nurse at the facility claimed understaffing had contributed to the spread as employees moved from one unit to another.<\/p>\n The US has more than one million confirmed cases of coronavirus – more than any other country.<\/p>\n Nursing homes across the US and in other parts of the world have been particularly badly hit by the pandemic.<\/p>\n Officials are investigating if veterans at the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, a state-run healthcare facility, received proper medical care. The superintendent at the home, Bennett Walsh, has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.<\/p>\n Mr Walsh said that Massachusetts state officials had been notified about the staffing shortages at the home as well as its coronavirus outbreak.<\/p>\n He has denied any wrongdoing in his management of the facility, rejecting the allegations as “outrageous”.<\/p>\n Edward Lapointe, whose father-in-law lives at the home, claimed the conditions there were “horrific”. “These guys never had a chance,” Mr Lapointe told the Associated Press news agency.<\/p>\n As well as the 70 confirmed Covid-19 deaths, there are 80 residents and 81 staff at the home who have tested positive for coronavirus, a spokeswoman from the state’s health office told the BBC.<\/p>\n Eleven veterans who tested negative for the virus have also died as of Wednesday, and one death is unconfirmed for Covid-19.<\/p>\n Residents are being re-tested for Covid-19 as appropriate, said the statement.<\/p>\n Joan Miller, a nurse at the Soldiers’ Home, told the AP she thought that veterans were living “on top of each other”. She claimed a lack of staff had meant that a unit in the home had been shut down in response to the coronavirus outbreak and the veterans housed there moved to other parts of the facility, making those more crowded.<\/p>\n “We didn’t know who was positive and who was negative and then they grouped people together and that really exacerbated it even more,” Ms Miller said.<\/p>\n The attorney general for Massachusetts, Maura Healey, said she had launched an investigation to determine “what went wrong at this facility and determine if legal action is warranted”.<\/p>\n Employees of the home had in the past weeks complained to local media about what they alleged were grim circumstances in the facility and what they thought was a poor handling of the crisis.<\/p>\n‘Horrific’ situation<\/h2>\n
‘On top of each other’<\/h2>\n