Gov. JB Pritzker is under fire from critics after the administration published a long-awaited report examining what led to the massive COVID-19 outbreak at the LaSalle Veterans Home last fall, which left 36 residents dead.
The investigation, which Pritzker ordered a few weeks into the deadly outbreak in November, found systemic organizational problems and failures to communicate in both the LaSalle Home and the state’s Department of Veteran Affairs, which runs the facility and three other veterans homes in Illinois.
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Along with inconsistent and confusing COVID protocols that led to lax enforcement among staff, the report also found former agency Director Linda Chapa LaVia “abdicated” her responsibilities to her chief of staff, who in essence performed three jobs. The failure to fill crucial vacant jobs inevitably left the chief of staff and other managers in IDVA and at the LaSalle home “with too many responsibilities to effectively lead.”
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Print article WASHINGTON After Navy veteran Jack Ray Hoaglan died from the coronavirus in December, his family tried to arrange a military funeral for the 73-year-old. They needed paper records from the National Personnel Records Center to prove the Ohio native’s service aboard the USS Enterprise decades ago. The phones at the St. Louis center, however, went unanswered. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the NPRC has sat empty, with employees working remotely. And records requests, most of which require someone to physically search for documents within the building, have been piling up. Now, the backlog has grown to over 499,000 requests, according to a spokesperson for the National Archives, which oversees the NPRC. The National Archives estimates that it will take 18 to 24 months to clear the backlog once the center is staffed at full capacity.
Veterans hit by huge pandemic-related records backlog yorkdispatch.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yorkdispatch.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.