I’m no expert when it comes to healthcare. I’m the guy who hates hospitals and needles so much I almost waited too long to call for an ambulance in the middle of a heart attack because it didn’t hurt that bad.

But I do have two sisters and both work in healthcare. One is some kind of a big deal at a long-term care facility, the other gives you needles and takes your blood.

One of my sisters is pretty angry that Governor Phil Murphy decided to let a couple thousand inmates out of prison to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Being some kind of a big deal at a long-term care facility gives my sister and her coworkers the right to be angry. It was Murphy who ordered long-term care facilities to accept COVID-19 positive patients.

Murphy wrote in his March 31st directive to nursing homes:

No patient/resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the post-acute care setting solely based on a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19. Persons under investigation for COVID-19 who have undergone testing in the hospital shall not be discharged until results are available. Post-acute care facilities are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized patient/resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.

Yet eight months after forcing COVID-positive patients on nursing homes Murphy decides more than 2,000 inmates need to be released from prison to “mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.”

It makes no sense!

Murphy obviously did not care about the spread of coronavirus when he forced nursing homes to take patients. He sure as hell showed no interest in mitigating the spread of the coronavirus to the families of healthcare workers.

I’m guessing Murphy’s decision to release inmates from prisons has much more to do with getting re-elected than the spread of coronavirus. Plain and simple, it’s science and data, political science, there are a lot of members of the unions that represent corrections officers, more than the many nursing home employees that are not unionized.

Long story short: Phil Murphy cares more about criminals than healthcare workers.