This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica Illinois is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. Sign up for The ProPublica Illinois newsletter for weekly updates . No one questioned that Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been firmly in charge of Chicago’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But during a briefing Lightfoot had with the city’s aldermen on March 30, she made it clear anyway. Each alderman was given an opportunity to ask a question, and when it was his turn, Andre Vasquez brought up the city’s growing housing crisis. Vasquez is a first-term alderman from the 40th Ward on the North Side. Like many new members of the City Council, he campaigned last year on a progressive agenda similar to Lightfoot’s that included promises to expand affordable housing. In the briefing, he reminded Lightfoot that, for many people, rent and mortgage payments would be due in the coming days. Could the mayor’s office provide alderme...
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This Story was Originally Published By ProPublica ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox . Olga Matievskaya and her fellow intensive care nurses at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in New Jersey were so desperate for gowns and masks to protect themselves from the coronavirus that they turned to the online fundraising site GoFundMe to raise money. The donations flowed in — more than $12,000 — and Matievskaya used some of them to buy about 500 masks, 4,000 shoe covers and 150 jumpsuits. She and her colleagues at the hospital celebrated protecting themselves and their patients from the spread of the virus. But rather than thanking the staff, hospital administrators on Saturday suspended Matievskaya for distributing “unauthorized” protective gear. Across the country, front-line medical providers and hospital administrators are butting heads about precautions against the corona...
NYC Mayor and Health Officials Misled Public About Plans to Move COVID-19 Patients Into Nursing Home, Advocates Say
This story was originally published by ProPublica ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox . New York City public health officials are moving patients suffering from COVID-19 into beds within a nursing home on Roosevelt Island that cares for hundreds of residents with a wide range of severe medical conditions, including dementia and other age-related ailments, paralysis, traumatic brain injury and profound developmental disabilities. The move comes after Mayor Bill de Blasio and city officials made a series of inaccurate and contradictory statements about their intention to use the facility to house COVID-19 patients and about their ability to protect the medically vulnerable residents of the Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center. The decision has alarmed elected leaders and advocates for the disabled and elderly who fear the city is jeopardizing the lives of Coler re...
Coronavirus Entered My Father’s Nursing Home and Nobody Warned Me. I Did Not Get the Chance to Save Him
undefined ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox . The call came around 9 a.m. on March 25. It was my father. “I’m not doing too good,” he said in between gasps for air. I asked him what was wrong. “I’m coughing up blood,” he said, adding that the medical staff at the nursing home in the Bronx where he lived wanted to send him to a nearby hospital. My father, 75, had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a crippling illness that causes severe breathing difficulty and can lead to death. He had lived in nursing homes since 2017 after X-rays showed his lungs had badly deteriorated. “Do we really have to send him to the hospital?” I asked a nursing supervisor over the phone. I worried about my father, already in poor health, waiting in an emergency room full of patients infected with the coronavirus. What I did not know was that he already had the virus. Shortly after bei...
