Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) is in the hot seat again after a report from the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) found that a directive he issued for nursing home admittance last March, during the COVID-19 pandemic, actually led to more deaths.
A 242-page report by the NYSBA’s Task Force on Nursing Homes and Long-Term Care condemns Cuomo for authorizing a March 25 directive that barred nursing homes from rejecting recovering coronavirus patients that had been discharged from hospitals.
The governor sent 9,000 COVID-positive patients to super spreader nursing homes in the state, despite complaints from facilities that the policy could help spread the virus.
“Although a determination of the number of additional nursing home deaths is beyond the capacity of the task force, there are credible reviews that suggest that the directive, for the approximately six weeks, that it was in effect, did lead to some number of additional deaths,” the report reads.
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And the task force pointed out in the report that, “It was unreasonable to leave the directive in place for so long after it was necessary.”
The directive was in place from March 25 to May 10, 2020, according to The New York Post.
Data from the NYSBA report is also associated with a study by the Empire Center for Public Policy that connects “several hundred and possibly more than 1,000” deaths of nursing home residents due to the March 25 order.
Earlier this year, The Post reported that top aides to Cuomo altered a state health department report to conceal the true number of people killed by COVID-19 in the state’s nursing homes.
The aides, including the secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa, pushed state health officials to edit the July report so only residents who died inside long-term care facilities, and not those who became ill there and later died at a hospital were counted.
The report said 6,432 people had died in the state’s nursing homes, but the actual number was above 9,200 deaths.
State officials acknowledged that the true number of deaths was higher because of the exclusion of nursing home patients who died in hospitals, but they declined at the time to give an estimate of that larger number of deaths, saying the numbers still needed to be verified.
But authorities insisted at the time that the edits were made because of concerns about accuracy, not to protect Cuomo’s reputation.
“While early versions of the report included out of facility deaths, the COVID task force was not satisfied that the data had been verified against hospital data and so the final report used only data for in facility deaths, which was disclosed in the report,” said Department of Health (DOH) spokesperson Gary Holmes.
Gov. Cuomo had refused for months to release complete data on how the early stages of the pandemic hit nursing home residents. A court order and state attorney general report in January forced the state to acknowledge the nursing home resident death toll was higher than the count previously made public.
The governor and his health commissioner recently defended the March directive, saying it was the best option at the time to help free up desperately needed beds at the state’s hospitals.
“We made the right public health decision at the time. And faced with the same facts, we would make the same decision again,” said Health Commissioner Howard Zucker.
On March 30, President Trump had sent up the USNS Comfort to help free up hospital beds, but it was barely used, and then Cuomo said New York didn’t need the Navy hospital ship on April 26.
A DOH spokesperson said of the latest report: “Sadly, this is yet another example of some politicians pushing their political agendas and personal vendettas.”
The spokesperson added, “This latest report, like others before it, supports what we’ve said all along, that New York was blind-sided and got hit the hardest, that when COVID got into communities it quickly and quietly spread from asymptomatic staff into nursing homes, and that New York’s nursing home experience was not unlike that of other states.”
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