Nursing homes getting more funding, emergency response team

Photo | SHNS Gov. Charlie Baker

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By State House News Service

Gov. Charlie Baker said Monday his administration would be making $130 million in additional funding available by the end of the week for nursing homes to pay for additional staff, cleaning and personal protective equipment.

Baker said long-term care facilities, including the state's 386 nursing homes, have "unfortunately evolved into a national hotspot," with 10,031 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than half of the state's deaths from the disease.

The governor also said the state was assembling a team of 120 nurses to deploy to facilities in emergency situations, and would be auditing long-term care facilities for compliance with a new set of care criteria including mandatory testing of staff and residents, a 28-point infectious disease check-list and adherence to protective equipment requirements.

The governor's press briefing was the first since Saturday, and came a week before his executive order to close all non-essential businesses during the public health emergency is scheduled to expire on May 4. Baker said he would have more to say about business closures and plans to reopen the economy later this week, but described Massachusetts as "still in the surge and very much in the fight," contrasting conditions here with some other states.

The governor did say he believed Massachusetts had been successful in "flattening the curve," but the number of new cases and hospitalizations, he said, have plateaued and "the trend data remains reasonably high."