New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully lobbied state health officials to pull data from a public report that showed more nursing home residents died from Covid-19 than the government acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the production of the report.
The July report, which examined the factors that led to the spread of the virus in nursing homes, focused only on residents who died in long-term care facilities, leaving out those who died in hospitals after falling ill in nursing homes. As a result, the report said 6,432 nursing home residents died – a significant count of the death toll attributed to the state’s most vulnerable population, people said. The initial version of the report said that nearly 10,000 nursing home residents died in New York in July last year, one person said.
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The changes that Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing home report, which were not previously disclosed, reveal that the state had more complete accounts of deaths outside the nursing home as early as the summer. The Department of Health resisted calls from state and federal lawmakers, the media and others to release the data for another eight months.
State officials now say that more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have been confirmed or are presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March last year – counting both those who died in long-term care facilities and those who later died in hospitals. That number is about 50% higher than the number of previous official deaths.
Cuomo now faces growing political pressure both for the way his government has dealt with the asylum pandemic and for accusations that he sexually harassed two former employees. Republicans and some Democrats have asked the governor to resign or be impeached.
Mr. Cuomo rejected requests for resignation and apologized for his behavior. Regarding deaths in nursing homes, Cuomo said his government followed federal guidelines and acted to preserve the hospital’s capacity.
State health commissioner Howard Zucker, photographed in January, was among the advisers who reviewed and requested changes to the July report.
Photograph:
Peter Foley / EPA / Shutterstock
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked the Cuomo government in February for information on deaths in nursing homes, the Wall Street Journal reported. Federal prosecutors expressed interest in the July report, people familiar with the matter said.
In response to questions from the Journal, government officials said on Thursday that Cuomo’s aides opposed the inclusion of data on deaths outside the facility because they feared its accuracy.
“The data from outside the facility was omitted after the DOH was unable to confirm that it had been properly verified,” said Beth Garvey, special adviser and senior adviser to Cuomo, in a statement.
An official familiar with the comings and goings between the Department of Health and Cuomo’s advisers said that state health commissioner Howard Zucker agreed that data from outside the facility should not be included in the report.
“[The Department of Health] he was comfortable with the final report and fully believes in his conclusion that the main motivator who introduced Covid to nursing homes was brought in by the team, ”said Gary Holmes, a spokesman for the Department of Health.
The Department of Health updated the report on February 11 to include deaths outside the facilities of nursing home residents, saying its findings remained unchanged by the new data.
State lawmakers on both sides said off-site death data was essential to assess nursing home policies that could prevent future fatalities. They said the Cuomo government’s decision to postpone disclosure constituted a cover-up of data that the governor knew would damage his political stature.
Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s top aide, explained the delay to state lawmakers during a February 10 meeting. She said the state rejected a legislative request for the data because of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. DeRosa said the state feared the information could be politicized by former President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a transcript.
The Department of Justice, through its Civil Rights Division, began requesting information on deaths in nursing homes in New York and other democratic states in August.
The initial July report was the product of a study by the Department of Health on factors that contributed to the number of deaths in nursing homes. The agency conducted the study in response to complaints from state legislators and people who lost loved ones that a March 25 Department of Health directive promoted the spread of the virus among members of the state’s most vulnerable population.
That guideline said that no nursing home could refuse to readmit residents or admit new hospital residents just because of a Covid-19 diagnosis.
Resident of a New York nursing home with a badge after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine in January.
Photograph:
Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press
The July report concluded that nursing homes were already full of the virus at the time of the March 25 policy and attributed the spread to employees who brought him to work.
Several of Mr. Cuomo’s top advisers – who were members of his Covid-19 task force – reviewed and requested changes to the report, the Journal reported earlier.
They included Mrs. DeRosa; Dr. Zucker; Jim Malatras, a longtime adviser who was appointed chancellor of the New York public college system in August; and Linda Lacewell, superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services.
The lead author of the report was Eleanor Adams, who until August worked at the Regional Office for the Metropolitan Area of the Secretariat of Health in a unit focused on infection control in health facilities, said one of the people. Since then, Dr. Adams has become a senior advisor to Dr. Zucker.
The initial version of the report submitted to the Cuomo team for review included data on deaths of residents of nursing homes in hospitals and deaths of residents of nursing homes, said people familiar with producing the report.
Although health department officials agreed to remove this data, they resisted requests by Cuomo’s aides to amend the report to minimize the role of the March 25 guideline in spreading the virus, some people said.
The report, as published, concluded that the directive “was not a significant factor in fatalities in nursing homes”.
“Covid task force officials did not request that the report conclude that the March 25 order played no role,” said Garvey in a statement. “Task force members, knowing that the report needed to withstand rigorous public scrutiny, were very careful not to overdo the statistical analysis presented in the report. Overall, ensuring public confidence in the conclusion was the ultimate goal of DOH and Covid’s task force when publishing the report. “
The March 25 order came at a time when hospitals were rushing to make room for an expected increase in coronavirus patients.
Nursing home operators, aware of the policy only after it was issued, immediately opposed it, saying it would introduce the virus into their facilities. A national group representing health care providers in nursing homes said at the time that the March 25 directive “was not at all consistent with patient safety principles”.
Covid-19 in nursing homes
New York State Department of Health spokeswoman Jill Montag said in August that the decision to issue the guideline “was made on merit by DOH public health experts and following [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] and [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines. ”Department of Health officials did not provide an updated statement when questioned on Thursday.
Guidance from the CMS and CDC at the time said that nursing homes could accept residents who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 if they could follow the necessary precautions to prevent transmission.
The Cuomo government terminated the directive in May.
The July report said the number of nursing home residents who died from Covid-19 was low compared to other northeastern states when measured as a percentage of the general population. But the other states counted asylum residents who died in hospitals, as well as those who died inside asylums.
In January, a report by the New York attorney general said that the state had underestimated deaths in nursing homes and that the governor’s guideline may have spread the disease.
—Lisa Schwartz and Corinne Ramey contributed to this article.
Write to Joe Palazzolo at [email protected], Jimmy Vielkind at [email protected] and Rebecca Davis O’Brien at [email protected]
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