Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year.
Subscribe for Full Access
September 2020 Issue [Letter from Washington]

Elder Abuse

Nursing homes, the coronavirus, and the bottom line
Illustrations by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. Source photographs © Getty Images, iStock, Jean Mohr/World Health Organization, and Alamy

Illustrations by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. Source photographs © Getty Images, iStock, Jean Mohr/World Health Organization, and Alamy

[Letter from Washington]

Elder Abuse

Nursing homes, the coronavirus, and the bottom line
Adjust

At the beginning of this year, Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center, a nursing home in Richmond, Virginia, housed 160 elderly residents, roughly half of whom were African-American. Most of them were there courtesy of Medicaid, the government program that finances health care for those with little or no money. By mid-May, 80 percent of Canterbury’s residents had been infected with the novel coronavirus. A third of them were dead.

Sharon Mitchell, a sixty-two-year-old former dental receptionist, was one of the casualties. She had been at Canterbury for two years, following a stroke brought on by the shock of losing her…

Subscribe or to continue reading.
| View All Issues |

October 2023

Close
“An unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out amid a homogenized media landscape.” —the New York Times
Subscribe now

Debug