New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his government faced a flurry of criticism after a report by their own state attorney general claiming that the state had counted less than 50% deaths in Covid-19 nursing homes.
The death toll in nursing homes in the state does not include residents who died of coronavirus after being transferred to hospitals, only deaths that occurred in facilities. The report by Attorney General Letitia James examined 62 nursing homes – about 10 percent of the state total – and found that the New York approach left a large number of hospital deaths out of the number of deaths in official nursing homes of State.
Defenders, researchers and lawmakers from both parties have been campaigning for months for the Cuomo government to disclose the total number of deaths associated with long-term care institutions.
Minority leader in the State Senate, Rob Ortt, a Republican, accused the government of hiding the deadly impact of the virus. “This was a deliberate attempt to deceive the public and the state of New York,” said Ortt, who asked for the resignation of state health commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker. “Why did the New York state’s chief prosecutor take it to get this?”
Cuomo, a Democrat, did not immediately comment on the report. Zucker denied that the state underestimated deaths in nursing homes, saying the state had always made it clear that its data included only deaths that occurred on the premises, not outside.
“The word ‘sub-count’ implies that there are more fatalities than reported; this is factually wrong,” Zucker said in a statement. Referring to the state Department of Health, he said, “DOH has always made it clear that our numbers are reported based on the location of death.”
The state has not yet released a complete count of deaths related to nursing homes, as it is still auditing the data, having detected “numerous inaccuracies” in the original numbers that the units reported to the state, Zucker said.
Zucker said the data the state has reviewed so far showed 3,829 deaths in hospitals among nursing home residents. This would increase the number of deaths related to nursing homes in the state from about 8,700 to more than 12,500.
The report also found that the facility’s failure to follow proper infection control, lack of access to equipment and tests for personal protection and inadequate personnel contributed to the fatal spread of the virus. James, a Democrat, is investigating more than 20 facilities accused of failing to protect residents and employees.
State Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat and chairman of the health committee, said in a statement that James’ findings were “disturbing” but that “unfortunately I am not surprised by them”.
“It is critical that the Cuomo administration finally release accurate data on deaths in nursing homes, which my colleagues and I have been asking for months,” said Rivera.
On Thursday, criticism of the Cuomo government also came from independent experts and advocates, who said the state had undermined its response to the pandemic by failing to disclose the total death toll earlier.
The New York approach to counting deaths in nursing homes “totally masked the true death rate and impact,” said David Grabowski, a Harvard University professor and health policy expert, who said that such data could have helped. to direct resources to problematic facilities and assist lawmakers in determining what went wrong.
“We still don’t know the exact number of deaths,” he said. “It is important that we get the real number, and why it is taking so long is not clear.”
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As the attorney general’s report examined only a fraction of the state’s nursing homes and the state’s audit continues, the total death toll is still unknown.
“It is shocking that the Cuomo government continues to withhold basic information about a major public health crisis that New Yorkers urgently want to know and clearly have a right to know,” said Bill Hammond, senior researcher at the Empire Center, a conservative studies in a statement. In September, the group sued the state for failing to disclose the number of nursing home residents who died off-site. The state promised to release the data by March 22, the organization said.
Stephen Hanse, president and CEO of the New York State Health Facilities Association, a business group representing nursing homes, defended the state’s approach, arguing that it was more reliable and objective to report deaths based on their locations, rather than associating everyone. the Covid-19 deaths of residents with their facilities.
“Can you know 100 percent where they were infected?” Hanse said. “It may have been in transport, or an individual may have come from the community and then to the nursing home” before succumbing to the virus in a hospital, he said.
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New York’s nursing homes have suffered devastating loss and isolation for nearly a year. Cuomo had previously been criticized by a March guideline that mandated health facilities to accept patients with Covid-19 discharged from hospitals. Its aim was to clean up the much needed hospital beds, but nursing home leaders said they feared the guideline would contribute to the spread of the virus, and Cuomo reversed it. More recently, family members have pressured Cuomo and state legislators to allow them to be designated as essential caregivers, able to visit their loved ones on the premises.
“I am angry that they were not transparent from the start. Every death that is not accounted for is someone’s loved one,” said Gelsey Randazzo Markese, who spent months pushing for essential caregiver visits to see her 91-year-old grandmother, who died of natural causes last month.
“It’s important to have the number so people can see how shocking it is,” said Markese. “So that we can move on and get this chapter closed – and find out what we can do to prevent it from happening again.”