A 66-year-old patient at the Dry Harbor nursing home died of COVID-19 last week, after the Queens facility gave vaccines only to permanent residents – a misguided policy that the state was supposedly already familiar with.
Vita Fontanetta, known as Tina, was admitted to the 360-bed establishment to recover from an inflamed leg on January 11. When the nursing home distributed the vaccines on January 13, it was excluded, a family member told councilman Robert Holden.
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On January 18, the grandmother of two was sent back to the hospital due to anemia, and the COVID test was positive on arrival, he said.
She died at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center on January 23.
“I feel that the nursing home was somehow responsible,” Fontanetta’s daughter-in-law told Holden (D-Queens) after a front-page report in The Post exposed the Dry Harbor selective vaccine fiasco.
“It does not appear that the state is properly monitoring the facilities of the nursing home, either for the prevention of Covid or for the launch of the vaccine,” said Holden on Saturday.
An outbreak of COVID-19 in Dry Harbor – at least 44 residents and 11 employees tested positive since December 22 – reveals flaws in the supervision of the Cuomo administration for safety and vaccination in New York’s nursing homes.
Holden joined Deputy Ron Kim (D-Queens), who lost an uncle in a nursing home due to COVID-19, in calling for a broad and independent investigation.
The councilor’s 96-year-old mother, Anne Holden, a rehabilitation patient in Dry Harbor, was also excluded from a first round of vaccinations that the asylum gave permanent residents through a federal program administered by the CVS on December 23.
Anne received the first dose three weeks later, on January 13, when other residents received the second dose. She contracted COVID on January 20 and was hospitalized. It remains in a stable condition.
Other patients and families are suffering from COVID after Dry Harbor did not vaccinate them.
Carmen Martinez, a resident since April, was excluded from vaccinations on December 23, her son Antonio Collazo told the Post.
Collazo said he received a recorded message from Dry Harbor on Christmas Eve saying he had vaccinated “the residents who requested it”.
Collazo complained that he had ordered the vaccine for his mother, who has mild Alzheimer’s. The 92-year-old woman was due to receive her first dose on January 13.
But on January 12, Martinez tested positive for COVID. She was hospitalized and is now unconscious on a respirator, clinging to life.
“I may never be able to see her alive again,” said Collazo of his mother, a retired federal employee, grandmother and great-grandmother.
A 73-year-old man from Queens, sent to Dry Harbor to recover from a hip fracture, also missed the prenatal vaccine. He tested positive for Covid on January 4, his sister told the Post.
Now he will have to wait 90 days to get vaccinated. He must also stop cancer treatment until he recovers from COVID, she said.
“I don’t know what the nursing home was thinking. Why don’t they protect patients from rehab?”
Last week, the sister received a recorded phone message from Dry Harbor administrator Mark Solomon, asserting that “they will distribute vaccines to everyone there and we shouldn’t worry about our family members,” she said. “A little late for my brother and the councilman’s mother.”
Her brother remains on the fourth floor of Dry Harbor, where all of COVID’s patients are accommodated.
Solomon did not return messages asking for comment.
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Holden said he spoke to a state Department of Health investigator last week, who told him he knew about Dry Harbor’s plan to vaccinate only permanent residents first, but did nothing to correct or prevent it.
“Do you think it is sensible in a Covid outbreak to vaccinate only a portion of patients, giving only a few people a chance to fight?” Holden said he asked the inspector, Carmen Meliton.
“It is not for me to say whether it is right or not,” he said, replied Meliton.
Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the state Department of Health, contradicted the statements, saying that health facilities are not required to submit a vaccination plan to the state.
But Bruno reiterated that Porto Seco did not follow the state protocol, saying that the state does not have a policy that prioritizes residents or patients.
“Vaccines are being given to all nursing home residents, regardless of their short or long term stay,” he said.
Holden is frustrated. “It is obvious that one hand does not know what the other is doing at the state Department of Health,” he said.
Bruno did not reply when asked if Porto Seco had informed the Ministry of Health about Fontanetta’s death. He also did not answer the question of how many unvaccinated residents or other residents who tested positive in Dry Harbor subsequently died in hospitals.
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Since the start of the pandemic, the state has reported reported deaths of patients who died of COVID in nursing homes – not those who caught the virus in nursing homes and died in hospitals.
Last week, State Attorney General Letitia James released a report criticizing the Cuomo government for drastically underreporting deaths in nursing homes.