Cathy Legere saw firsthand the conditions that elder residents of long-term care were enduring, and the intense pressure that personal care staff were under, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The retired infection control nurse volunteered her services at the Orchard Villa home where her father-in-law, Nick, was a resident, in April 2020—and said she witnessed a deeply “broken” system before contracting the virus herself.
As she isolated herself at home, she was horrified to learn that her father-in-law, Nick, was left in a room for almost 24 hours with the dead body of a resident he’d watched slowly succumb to the disease over two days….