In December 2019, Sharon Farrell flew from Florida to visit her brother Stephen at a New Jersey nursing home, where, she said, she found “disgusting” conditions. "I told the nurse, 'I am calling the state,'" she said. "I’m paying $9,000 a month, and I wouldn’t let my dog live like this."
"The individuals that ran Skyline should not ever be in charge of a nursing home again, and yet here we are," said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. He said the pandemic exposed"Different names, same practices," Grabowski said. "We need to ensure that there aren’t these kind of back doors, that nursing homes aren’t able to simply put a new name on the building and continue to operate as is.
The Schwartz family has not left the nursing home business. While Skyline is defunct, Joseph Schwartz is still listed as the owner or a co-owner of four facilities, according to federal nursing home ownership data. As Covid began to spread, Maglioli said, he heard his sister and his father talking on the phone. His father was saying he was not sure Andover could cope if he came down with the deadly new disease. And then, Maglioli said, "my sister never talked to my dad again." Maglioli’s father died April 9, 2020.
Before the bodies began to pile up at Andover, Nicolai said, he was told to move residents from room to room, even though the facility did not know who had Covid and who did not. "I do believe it helped spread the cases of Covid throughout the building," he said. He moved the body back inside the facility, but he cannot shake the images. "I have had really bad dreams, and I don’t have the money to pay a therapist," he said.Documents newly obtained through an open records request by NBC News show how the facility struggled to cope with the outbreak in April 2020.
Wilson wrote, "Staff were observed to be touching their PPE and their face with bare hands." He wrote that he "confronted [the nurse on duty] about this observed behavior. She assured me that it was okay because she was 'not in a room.'" Federal inspection reports conducted in mid-April 2020 showed similar observations, noting that residents who had symptoms were intermingled with those who were asymptomatic.Representatives for the owners said that at that time it was "often impossible to know who had Covid and who did not because of a lack of testing capability."
The National Guard did respond to a request for emergency aid that Sussex County officials sent to the governor on May 6. Two days later, 22 members of the Guard went to Andover and performed nonmedical tasks, like cleaning the facility.