Advocacy groups call on Pritzker to move some nursing home residents to hotels to ensure social distancing

Advocacy groups want Gov. J.B. Pritzker to transfer some nursing home residents to hotels to ease crowding and ensure social distancing at long-term care facilities.

The Institutional Rescue and Recovery Coalition, composed of several senior and disability rights groups, is calling for immediate action to prevent further spread of the coronavirus among vulnerable populations at nursing homes and long-term care facilities, which account for more than half of the state’s virus deaths.

It’s impossible to social distance when multiple people often share rooms at these facilities, said Becky Ozaki, health care and economic justice organizer with the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, a nonprofit that seeks economic, social and racial justice for seniors.

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“Under this plan, people who don’t need high levels of care would be evacuated to hotels, many of which are empty right now,” Ozaki said.

The coalition held a virtual news conference Tuesday to discuss its proposed plan.

Suzanne Klugg, a former Illinois nursing home resident in suburban Palatine, said she shared a room with two other people but was able to transition out of the home in January “just in time not to catch the virus.”

Klugg, 69, moved into an apartment on her own in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. When she checked in on friends at the facility a few weeks later, she learned five had died on the same day after they’d contract the coronavirus.

“These people aren’t just statistics ... they are human beings, they had names, they had lives,” she said. “What is Pritzker waiting for? More deaths? He needs to issue at least a partial evacuation order from congregate settings, and it needs to be done now,” she said.

Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in an emailed statement: “The administration has always listened to advocates who come to us with serious input for discussion on how to protect our most vulnerable residents. But moving medically fragile people from their homes and placing them into hotels entirely unequipped to care for them, is not something public health experts endorse.

“Instead, the administration has worked to scale up testing at our congregate facilities, provide PPE to employees, and train them in infection control and best practices. Families are free to move their loved ones home if they see fit.”

Coalition member Fran Tobin called Pritzker’s response “disingenuous at best.”

“Any truly ‘medically fragile’ persons would not be moved and would be safer in a less crowded facility,” Tobin, who serves as executive director of the Alliance for Community Services, said in an email. “Most of these residents we’re saying should be rescued need very little in the way of support services (certainly not any complex medical care).”

The coalition’s push for the use of hotels would be temporary; the goal is to return people into a community setting.