One nurse at the New Jersey Veterans Memorial at Menlo Park was ordered not to wear a mask because it would “scare the patients” — even as the first deaths from COVID-19 began stalking nursing homes across the country.
When she went to Walmart to buy fabric to make her own, she was threatened that “there could be consequences” for violating the facility's no-mask mandate.
Another nurse complained to the nursing home's administrator of being on the units “all day with the residents coughing in our faces.” Still, she would not be provided with a mask to ward off the spread of infection.
“We cannot care for them six feet away. Where is the protection for staff?” she asked.
And one certified nursing assistant refused to come to work despite the demands of her supervisors after she came down with a fever, chills, a cough and other COVID symptoms in early April 2020. Just over a week later, she was hospitalized at Newark Beth israel Hospital. By May 11, she was dead.
Employees of the troubled veterans home at Menlo Park, have filed lawsuits alleging the state, the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, the Governor's Office, and administrators of the state-operated nursing home, needlessly put in harm's way as COVID struck.
Accusing the state of being “grossly negligent, knowingly careless, and reckless,” while deviating from accepted standards of long-term care when the first threats of COVID began to appear,…
