Former Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine faced tough questions on Thursday during a Senate confirmation hearing about discrepancies reported in state records on COVID-related deaths in nursing homes.
Levine was appointed by President Biden to serve as assistant secretary to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“You assured me that Pennsylvania did not do what New York did, that it reported accurately,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told LevineThucted. “However, I was informed that in September 2020, Spotlight PA reported problems with inappropriate reporting of cases and deaths in nursing homes,” she continued, pointing to facilities that reported “no data”, while facilities claimed they had .
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Levine said that these discrepancies can be explained because of the “time lag” between the time a death was reported and the time it hit the electronic death notification system (EDRS).
But Keystone State’s publication – Spotlight PA – claimed that Levine’s explanation of the “delay time” on Thursday did not account for the discrepancies they found.
The problem originated after health facilities “reported for themselves” their coronavirus cases and deaths to the state health department via separate online portals, not through the state’s EDRS, as Levine claimed on Thursday .
The lack of uniform reports would have led to irregularities and incomplete records.
In an attempt to remedy reporting anomalies, the Pennsylvania Department of Health informed nursing home administrators in a June 18 letter that they could face fines or imprisonment if they did not meet the state’s reporting requirements.
But Spotlight PA found that while the facilities claimed they were sending data from the nursing home against the coronavirus through the state system, the irregularities persisted.
In addition, the facility was frustrated that its public-facing data was fraught with errors or failed to explain why its data was excluded entirely from weekly state reports.
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The agency’s investigative reports found that the errors continue to affect the state’s EDRS. On February 17, 139 installations recorded “no data”, followed by missing data for 145 installations the following week, on February 23.
Fox News was unable to reach the state Department of Health immediately for comment, but found that more than half of all reported deaths in Pennsylvania came from COVID-19 cases found in nursing homes.
Pennsylvania has reported nearly 923,000 cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began, with about 24,000 deaths – 12,355 of which have been reported by nursing homes.