New York State has finally released fatality data for individual nursing homes, painting a much darker picture of the tax levied on the COVID-19 virus.
The state Department of Health has quietly updated its death chart in nursing homes to include those who died in hospitals as well as on the premises. The 4,067 hospital deaths had previously been included in the state’s overall count.
The total number of patients in nursing homes who died of COVID-19 is now 13,163, with almost a third dying in a hospital.
The Upper East Side Rehabilitation and Nursing Center had 29 deaths at home and another 51 in a hospital.
Information for the Bronxcare Special Care Center had previously shown only eight deaths from COVID-19. But there were 20 additional deaths in the hospital, according to the new data.
At the Boropark Rehabilitation and Health Center, 41 more people died in the hospital, in addition to 32 at home. The Sheepshead Nursing & Rehabilitation Center had nine deaths at home and 50 outside.
And there were 32 residents of the Parker Jewish Institute for Health and Rehabilitation in Queens who died in the hospital, in addition to 83 at home.
The state Department of Health refused for months to provide the information until it was forced by a judge on Thursday.
Albany’s acting Supreme Court judge Kimberly O’Connor criticized DOH for claiming it could not produce the data and ordered the statistics to be released within five days. The Empire Center for Public Policy had sought the information under a request from the Freedom of Information Act.
But Bill Hammond, a senior member of the Empire Center for health policy, said the information released by DOH on Saturday was a small fraction of what he had requested. The group wants daily counts of fatalities from each nursing home to track the path of the virus over time.
He said he was the only one to assess the impact of the March 25 state guideline, which mandated that poorly equipped and understaffed nursing homes accept patients with COVID-19, knowing that the elderly population was at greatest risk for the virus. .
Hammond said DOH has until Wednesday to release all the data.
State health commissioner Howard Zucker finally released the total number of deaths in nursing homes on January 28, putting the number at 12,743 with deaths in hospitals instead of 8,740. The revelation came after Attorney General Letitia James produced a hard-hitting report saying the death toll could be up to 50 percent higher than the authorities claimed.
That total puts New York’s fatalities ahead of California’s by 2,600, the Empire Center concluded.
The DOH said deaths in New York’s nursing homes “are well below the national average.”