Volunteers say the hospital administration has promised an easing of the Covid lockdown since March. It simply demanded horse sense and common decency. The solution here didn’t require legislation. They’re asking for family, not the Hanoi Hilton. That time shouldn’t be spent in a bureaucratic solitary confinement. Struggling to maintain their connection with the wider world and hold on to their dignity as time takes its toll. You try to remember the faces, the conversations, to feel that connection and your first stop after returning stateside isn’t an empty room. It’s what you think of day-in, day-out while overseas. hospitals like the one in Philadelphia allowed for longer visitations inside of the resident’s rooms months ago.Īs an Iraq War veteran myself, I know the importance of family. Coupled with high gasoline prices and an 18-county service area across two states, some families found it difficult to make a four-hour drive for a 30-minute, no-contact meeting. “John became so depressed after lockdown that he just went to sleep, and he gave up living,” Huszar told WOLF-TV news.
That’s what David Huszar says happened to his uncle John, a decorated Vietnam veteran. Trying to keep them at zero, though, is possibly more dangerous.
We know hospital administrators wanted to keep Covid rates low. It’s bureaucracy at its most unfeeling and emotional neglect at its most despicable.
Which begs the question: how did the VA permit such overbearing restrictions to continue well past the point when other facilities in Pennsylvania and around the country recognized the need for our veterans to have actual human contact? They waived a half-hour time limit for family visits, reopened for visits by friends and now permit VA residents to gather in an outside courtyard. For more than two years, vets at the Wilkes-Barre center were held in isolation, with brief family visits permitted only in the lobby.įollowing a public outcry and protests at the facility, the hospital’s executive director lightened some of the restrictions, permitting family visits in limited circumstances. They waited alone in rooms, unvisited by volunteers who are still being kept away. Yet that’s exactly what happened at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Wilkes-Barre, where elderly and ailing vets have been treated more like prisoners of war than heroes worthy of the freedoms they guarded. The men and women who put their lives on the line shouldn’t have them placed on hold by a Veterans Administration that kept hundreds in isolation long after the rest of our state emerged from Covid lockdown. Tired of ads? Subscribers enjoy a distraction-free reading experience.
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