In March 2020, my aunt collapsed with a painful headache and was rushed to the hospital. We would soon learn that the headache was symptomatic of an aggressive form of brain cancer that no surgery or treatment could cure. Within six weeks we buried my beloved aunt and godmother.
Her death was swift and devastating, made all the more painful by the draconian “stay at home” orders that the state of Illinois issued. The blue state, led by the far-left Gov. J.B. Pritzker, was not alone. Lockdown madness was sweeping the nation. Among its first victims were people like my uncle, my cousins, my family — all locked out from seeing our dying loved one in the opening days of her hospitalization. My aunt’s husband of 60 years couldn’t even be at her bedside.
We ultimately were among the fortunate ones. My aunt’s prognosis was so bleak that her healthcare providers released her to die at home. Thank God for this miracle in a desperate time. We got to say goodbye. My aunt was surrounded by family, friends, and love while she drifted from this world — at times in violation of Pritzker’s edict.
So many Americans weren’t so blessed.
‘To Die Alone’
“We’re approaching 1 million U.S. deaths from COVID-19, but the numbers can’t capture how these deaths occur: alone. Patients take their last breaths amid the alarms of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), without their families,” wrote Helen T. D’Couto, who in 2022 was an attending physician in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Georgetown University Hospital when she wrote a powerful column detailing her heart-breaking experiences during Covid and its accompanying irrational — and unscientific — lockdowns.
“This near-universal policy of forced isolation in the ICU is not conclusively supported by data and is clearly traumatic to patients, their families, and clinicians like me caring for the dying in the ICU,” D’Couto stressed in the column, headlined, “Forcing my Covid patients to die alone is inhumane — and unnecessary.” The piece was published on March 7, 2022, about two years after a Rockford, Ill., hospital locked out my uncle from seeing his dying wife.
It’s hard to believe we’re now five years from the beginning of all of that madness.
Of all the terrible things the “experts,” the groupthink scientists, the power-drunk unelected bureaucrats, and the evil politicians did to us in that unconscionable lockdown of our liberties, forcing people to die alone was the most inhumane.
In July 2020, as some red states had lifted the mass quarantines on their citizens and blue states doubled down on the disastrous lockdown policies, a Northwestern Medicine study found patients dying from Covid were nearly 12 times more likely to die in a hospital or nursing facility than patients who passed from any cause in 2018, Northwestern Now reported.
“The patients dying of COVID-19 in medical facilities may not have any family with them because of visitor restrictions,” Dr. Sadiya Khan, assistant professor of preventive medicine in epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine physician, told the publication.
“A loved one dying alone takes a huge mental toll on families,” Khan added. “It impairs the family’s ability to grieve and cope with the loss. For patients, we’ve all thought about how terrible it would be to have to die alone. This is the horror happening to thousands of people in medical facilities where no family member or loved one is able to be present with them during their final moments on earth.”
It was awful. It is unforgivable.
‘Death from a Broken Heart’
On March 13, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a lockdown order prohibiting all but “essential personnel” from entering nursing homes. By October 2023, CMS had reported more than 167,000 nursing home patients had died from Covid, according to a Clinical Infectious Diseases published in Oxford Academic.
“We will never be able to tally the number of elderly residents who died in nursing homes during this pandemic from loneliness or a broken heart. Death from a broken heart is real,” Debra A. Goff, of the Department of Pharmacy at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, wrote, detailing her personal experiences in losing her nursing home-bound mother.
‘Never Forget’
Five years after the madness began, American can never forget what insane lockdowns — and the people behind them — did to our republic and to its citizens.
Remember, too, that many of the same politicians who are now moaning and protesting about federal bureaucrats losing their jobs pushed for and cheered on the lockdowns that drove millions of private-sector workers from theirs. How many of those same politicians stood up for the federal employees who faced losing their positions through the stroke of President Joe Biden’s pen for refusing to get an ineffective and potentially dangerous Covid vaccine?
The same people who are shedding tears over violent illegal immigrants being rounded up and jailed or deported are ones who created tip lines to rat out Americans who violated lockdown orders. The same people who are lying to you about Trump and Republicans cutting Social Security benefits to actual beneficiaries remained silent when nursing home patients were forced die alone in the name of Covid fear, politics, and “following the science.”
“Patients critically ill with COVID-19 usually spend several weeks in the ICU before they are discharged or die, weeks of agony separated from families,” D’Couto, the pulmonary physician, wrote. “Before we place patients on a ventilator, we, the ICU staff, often make video calls home. Hands reach out to each other, millimeters apart on the screen but cruelly, never able to touch. Real kisses are replaced with air kisses. I recall innumerable patients gasping for air, tears streaming down their faces, and fear etched in their eyes while calling their families in what were their last conversations.”
What a cruel and unnecessary way to die. What an awful time in America.
We can never forget.