An Albany-based watchdog group said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home directive was likely responsible for more than 1,000 additional deaths of residents during the coronavirus pandemic, despite several government denials that his order was the main culprit.
Cuomo’s office was silent about the content of the report released by the nonprofit Empire Center for Public Policy on Thursday and reviewed by Fox News, which is based on information provided to them by the New York State Department of Health (DOH). The governor is facing intense reaction against the scandal, including a federal investigation into how his government is dealing with the crisis. The focus on Cuomo comes when liberal CNN and the governor’s brother, host Chris Cuomo, give Democrat controversies little or no airtime. The network previously gave Chris Cuomo a free rein to conduct friendly, comical interviews with the governor, who wrote a book on how to deal with the pandemic in the middle of the pandemic.
The surveillance group’s analysis, which compared mortality rates at facilities that admitted patients with COVID-19 discharged from hospitals with rates from others that were not discharged, suggests that Cuomo’s controversial mandate is “associated with” more one in six out of 5,780 nurse deaths across the state between late March and early May.
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“Across the state, the findings indicate that new positive admissions for COVID between late March and early May, which totaled 6,327, were associated with several hundred and possibly more than 1,000 additional deaths of residents,” said the report.
A Cuomo spokesman did not respond to Fox News’s request for comment on Friday.
The time table looks at the period between March 25 and May 10, when Cuomo ordered nursing homes to admit patients who tested positive for COVID-19 in an effort to alleviate overcrowding in hospitals. He later rescinded the order after almost two months.
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The move proved deadly and the issue exacerbated by the Cuomo government, which has obstructed Department of Justice (DOJ) investigators by withholding data on the number of coronavirus deaths in the state to avoid blame for the situation that occurred in assisted living facilities.
A state Department of Health (DOH) official defended the administration for Fox News, saying the watchdog group used “strictly selected data to fit a predefined conclusion”.
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The Empire Center found that nursing homes outside of New York City and its suburbs increased the number of deaths after accepting COVID-19 patients at its facility, with an average of 9.3 more deaths per facility than those who did not. did, according to the report.
Meanwhile, DOH commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker pointed to another part of the watchdog’s findings, which said the Cuomo directive was not solely responsible for 15,049 deaths in nursing homes, adding that he agreed with the health department’s assessment.
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“The Empire Center’s conclusion that ‘the data indicates that the March 25 memorandum was not the sole or main cause of the large number of deaths in nursing homes’ and that COVID-19′ caused havoc in nursing homes in nationwide and around the world, including in jurisdictions that have not adopted policies similar to the March 25 guidance memorandum ‘is consistent with the Department of Health analysis that concluded that the March 25 guidance was not a factor in infections and fatalities due to COVID and COVID was introduced to nursing homes mainly through the visiting team, “said Zucker in a statement to Fox News.
The part of the Empire Center report that Zucker referred to, however, also stated that “[a]At the same time, the results contradict a central finding in the Department of Health’s July 6 report on coronavirus in nursing homes. ”
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The watchdog group said the health department says “[a]admission policies were not a significant factor in deaths in nursing homes “and”[t]data do not show a consistent relationship between admissions and increased mortality “were not supported by their results.
“This analysis indicates that the orientation may have made the situation worse,” the Empire Center said of Cuomo’s order.
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The DOJ review of the Cuomo nursing home guideline is just one in a series of investigations surrounding the state. On Thursday, the FBI and the Brooklyn Prosecutor’s Office announced a separate investigation into the response to the Cuomo pandemic.
Fox News’s Tamara Gitt contributed to this report.