COVID-19’s cover-up of deaths in nursing homes by Governor Andrew Cuomo hid almost 1,900 fatalities in New York City alone – with new numbers sending the count at a Queens facility that shot up more than 1,000 percent.
A Post analysis of the latest data from the state Department of Health shows that 5,443 nursing home residents were killed by the coronavirus in the Big Apple.
That statistic includes 1,885 elderly people who died in hospitals and were not included in the DOH official count of deaths in nursing homes until the Cuomo administration finally started releasing its numbers, under duress, following a hard-hitting report last month by the prosecutor General Letitia. James.
In New York City, the new figures increase the total death count in nursing homes by 53%, according to analysis of current DOH data on Saturday.
This is very timid with the 56 percent under-count that James estimated in his report.
The Post analysis also revealed that almost all of the city’s 162 nursing homes that reported COVID-19 deaths within their walls – 152 – had residents died after being sent to hospitals for treatment.
They include the Park Terrace Care Center in Corona, where only three residents were actually killed by the virus on the premises.
But another 31 residents died in hospitals, bringing the actual death toll to 34 – an impressive 1033% increase.
A Queens resident, whose 72-year-old mother lives on Park Terrace, was outraged to learn the numbers, calling them “terrible” and saying that he thought “perhaps a handful of residents” had died.
“I didn’t know that 34 people passed through this facility,” said Anthony, 40, who was handing a bag of clean clothes to his mother.
“There is so much that we don’t know.”
Asked what he thought of Cuomo, Anthony said: “He deceived the nation and family members.”
Two officials also said they did not know that so many residents died, and one said, “It is a little shocking.”
The other said, “I think this is crazy. I think the steps were not being carried out ”.
Just behind Park Terrace – with a 1,000 percent increase in death toll – is the Rockaway Care Center in Queens.
He also had three residents killed behind his doors, but another 30 died in hospitals.
The Jamaica Hospital Center, also in Queens, had only four residents killed there, but 34 in hospitals.
The Post revealed exclusively last week that Cuomo’s top aide, Governor Melissa DeRosa’s secretary, privately told Democratic lawmakers that his government hid data on deaths in their hospitals in August due to an investigation pending by federal prosecutors.
“Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we were giving you, what we started to say, would be used against us,” she said during the videoconference on Wednesday at night.
Last month, Cuomo also sparked outrage by dismissing the importance of where the deaths occurred, saying: “But who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”
The nursing home in the city with the largest number of residents who died in hospitals is Manhattan’s Upper East Side Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, which has 52, almost double the 29 who died at the facility.
The Sheepshead Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Brooklyn had 51 deaths in hospitals, compared with just nine in the nursing home.
At Brooklyn’s Boro Park Rehabilitation and Health Care Center, 42 residents died in hospitals, representing more than half of the 74 fatalities.
Across the state, the total number of residents in nursing homes who died of COVID-19 was 13,407 on Saturday.
That number included 4,181 who died in hospitals and increased the number of people who died in nursing homes by 45 percent.
Cuomo’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.