“Nobody was there to comfort her, to explain to her, it was very painful for me. And she really felt abandoned, for sure,” said Nicole Jaouich when describing her mother’s last days in a nursing home in Quebec.
Her mother, Hilda Zlataroff, was 102 and suffering from dementia when Covid-19 was first detected at her long-term care institution in March last year.
Her family says she didn’t die of the virus, but, as a camera in the room placed there by her family documents painfully, she languished.
Zlataroff was unable to feed himself without help and the video, provided to CNN by his family, sometimes shows her apparently in pain, confused, too weak to hold a glass of water.
“It was painful for me to know that I was not there and that in the last six weeks of her life she went hungry,” said Jaouich, sharing the anguish of seeing his mother suffering on camera, but forbidden to go home to help.
“I was looking at my mom through the camera and she was breathing so hard I could see she was in pain,” she said.
Canadian military brought in to help
For weeks after the initial blockades last winter, the situation in dozens of nursing homes across the country, both public and private, became so serious that by the end of April it was quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called in troops to assist some long-term institutions in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
To date, almost 22,000 Canadians have died from Covid-19. Many of the families of the thousands of elderly people who died in these homes say that now is the time to answer these difficult questions.
Coronavirus hit health homes with a shortage of staff
The crisis began in the early days of the pandemic in March, when provincial health officials across Canada closed hundreds of facilities for family members and visitors, believing they were protecting the most vulnerable from the virus.
But within a few weeks, families were horrified to learn that many of these facilities – already chronically understaffed – were in a state they described as chaotic.
“It was very shocking to see what was going on there, as people have been unable to contact their loved ones for several days,” said Nadia Sbaihi in an interview with CNN about her grandfather’s death.
Rodrigue Quesnel was 94 when he died from Covid-19. He contracted the virus from a long-term institution outside Montreal. His family describes him as “bigger than life” and still in his right mind, but he died of the virus last spring.
“If I regret something about those last few days, it’s that we were robbed, especially in the first wave, when we couldn’t see our loved ones and they died alone,” said Sbaihi.
Some residents were left in dirty clothes and sheets for hours, says the report
Covid-19 has quickly spread to hundreds of long-term institutions across Canada. In June, the Canadian Public Health Agency recognized that 4 out of 5 Covid-19-related deaths occurred in long-term care homes.
“This decision by the government to prevent family caregivers from entering and not to provide adequate staff to provide even the most basic care, this decision is completely unforgivable,” said Patrick Martin-Ménard, a lawyer representing families in an ongoing coroner inquiry in Quebec.
But perhaps the most shocking was an overwhelming and tragic assessment by the Canadian military after they were sent to some of these facilities.
Released in May in the province of Ontario, the report documents allegations of abuse and neglect in at least five nursing homes.
He documents “terrible” conditions in which residents did not bathe for days, vulnerable elderly people were kept in dirty clothes and sheets for hours and where Covid-19 patients could roam.
He accuses five long-term institutions in the Toronto area of having poor hygiene and disinfection practices and still claims that employees ignored residents who were crying in pain, sometimes for hours.
The Premier of Ontario was very touched when asked about the report and swore there would be “justice” and “responsibility”.
“It is heartbreaking, horrible, it is shocking that it can happen here in Canada. It is distressing and reading these reports is the most difficult thing I did as prime minister,” said Doug Ford at a news conference in May.
However, Ontario public health officials reported last week that deaths in long-term care homes in Ontario due to the second wave of Covid-19, which began in September, have already exceeded those of the first wave.
Both the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, where most deaths occurred in nursing homes, have now introduced new training programs and increased salaries and benefits for employees at these facilities.
“I think we have to look at ourselves a lot collectively and think about how we treat our elderly population, not just during the pandemic, but over the past ten, twenty, thirty years,” said Martin-Ménard.
Families hope that investigations will restore a sense of dignity
Sbaihi believes that the treatment of many of his loved ones in nursing homes has been inhumane. She and other family members say that what should result from multiple investigations, still ongoing, is finally to give the elderly the attention and dignity they deserve.
“It won’t bring anyone back, but I hope we can have answers … to give a voice to those who haven’t had one or whose voices have not been heard,” she says.
Jaouich says his mother would not want her to accept what happened to thousands of elderly people in those nursing homes. And she says she is grateful to have finally seen her mother in her last hours and to give her the comfort she lacked in the last weeks of her life.
“And I held her hand, her hands were so cold, and I was warming her hands and she shook my hand … three times. And this was such a moving moment for me, and I said to her ‘mommy, I don’t abandon you. ‘”