New York undercounted nursing home deaths by as much 50 percent, report finds
By: politico (Politico PRO)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The New York attorney general on Thursday accused the state of drastically undercounting Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes, saying in a stinging new rebuke of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration that the official tally of about 8,500 may be off by as much as 50 percent.
A 76-page report, released Thursday morning by Attorney General Tish James, adds a new layer to the criticism the Democratic governor has faced over the state's handling of Covid-19 in long-term care facilities — an issue that came to a head in recent days as state lawmakers pressed for the findings of a long-awaited inquiry into the deaths of nursing home residents.
The report, based on preliminary findings, suggests that a larger number of long-term care residents died from the virus than reflected in state Department of Health data and that government guidance requiring admission of Covid-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm. The state has been accused of depressing the total number of deaths by only counting those that occurred in the facilities, leaving out any resident who was transferred to a hospital.
The issue has dogged Cuomo, seen as a national star for his public messaging during the early days of the pandemic, since last summer. His administration has gone to great lengths to claims it did nothing wrong.
A Department of Health report released in July refuted claims that a late March nursing home admission policy led to thousands of Covid-19 deaths at long-term care facilities, suggesting that coronavirus-related deaths in such facilities were largely driven by community spread from infected staff or visitors. Cuomo modified the hospital transfer policy in early May.
In a statement Thursday, the Democratic attorney general said her office's report "seeks to offer transparency that the public deserves and to spur increased action to protect our most vulnerable residents."
"Nursing homes residents and workers deserve to live and work in safe environments, and I will continue to work hard to safeguard this basic right during this precarious time," James said.
Cuomo's office and the state Department of Health did not immediately respond to the AG's findings, which were first reported by The New York Times.
The report from James, who until now has avoided such high-profile criticism of the Cuomo administration, creates new discord between the governor and one of the state's most powerful elected officials. The governor has highlighted his leadership during the pandemic, which has killed more than 40,000 people in New York.
The AG's report also found that nursing homes' lack of compliance with an executive order requiring communication with family members caused avoidable pain and distress; insufficient personal protective equipment for nursing home staff put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities; and insufficient Covid-19 testing for residents and staff in the early stages of the pandemic put residents at increased risk of harm.
The report says that preliminary data suggests that many nursing home residents died from Covid-19 after being transferred from their nursing homes to hospitals — deaths the state has not included in its published total nursing home death data. It also "reflects apparent underreporting to DOH by some nursing homes of resident deaths occurring in nursing homes."
The AG's office, which began investigating alleged Covid-19-related neglect at nursing homes in early March, is conducting ongoing investigations into more than 20 facilities.
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Andrew Cuomo is a rock star who writes books and wins awards!
Been meaning to ask ... is John Durham your twin sister?
My current mission.
Isn't this the opposite of the massive overcounting of covid deaths alleged by Trump?
So Cuomo shouldn't be held accountable for his own fuked up incompetence.
One day, sometime after Hell freezes over, a politician will acknowledge a mistake and just be human about it. I think he might say "Gee, I guess I shouldn't have done that. I want to do right by all the people, and it seemed like the right idea at the time, but it clearly turned out to be the wrong choice. Sorry about that."
Cuomo should absolutely be held accountable for everything he does. Everybody should. I just thought it ironic that you now seem to think that more cases is beneficial to the conservative narrative after a year of the opposite.
Your comment makes no sense.
Trump has nothing to do with Cuomo and the other fucked up Democratic governors that pulled this stunt. Time for them to pay the piper.
"But Trruuummmmppppp!!!!!!" doesn't work any more; but the left will trot it out for four more years; because it is all they have.
Bengazi.
It's gonna go away. We'll have packed churches for Easter.
We didn't last year. And anyway, notwithstanding some sensational, mostly isolated exceptions, houses of worship, by and large, are not what has been driving the spread of disease. Indoor worship (like any indoor group activity) has been identified as an activity that has a high risk for transmission, but the vast majority of churches have reacted quite responsibly to the pandemic.
Data on this is somewhat scattered, but here are a few examples: This site from Illinois shows that houses of worship are a relatively small contributor to Covid spread. There are similar results from this site in Michigan and this site in Virginia and this site in Southern California .
Factories and other workplaces, group homes, bars, parties, and retail contribute far more to the spread of the virus than churches.
You're not stupid Tacos. You know we're not talking about going to church.
Don't assume that an unstated thought is understood by all. I responded to what I read in your comment. If you think I missed something, all you have to do is say so. Politely, would be nice.
This is the slimy part.
That Cuomo has been hiding nursing home deaths has been obvious since the summer, as I've made the point repeatedly that he was doing so, but maybe now his fans will face reality after his party's AG confirms what the AP and other agencies have long reported.
Truly one of the great gaslighting jobs of all times was done by the media in support of Cuomo. All the self congratulatory books and fawning "cuomosexuals" in the supposedly objective media can't cover up how spectacurly Cuomo bungled Covid.
Cuomo seems unable to reach rock bottom. He and supporters (how embarrassed they must feel) rebutted criticism of his self evidently insane policy of forcing nursing homes to accept Corvid positive residents by claiming NY actually had a really low percentage of nursing home deaths, so the policy was fine. Now that he got lying and covering up the number of nursing home deaths, he turns around and does the "who cares where they died" deflection to distract from the months he spent lying about where people died to protect his image. He may lack intelligence, honesty and any quality necessary to lead a state, but he sure has an outsized ability to lie shamelessly.
In general, the left is in control of many things. This is the era of the left. They have no intention of following the law or being consistent. The leftist media continues to downplay this story. NY health officials have tried to deflect from it.
Prime example of the double standard:
"The FBI lawyer who admitted to falsifying an e-mail to renew a wiretap against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was spared jail time and sentenced to a year of probation by a DC federal judge Friday."
The excuse for the outrageous decision:
The judge was convinced the attorney fudged the document to save himself some work.
Judge James Boasberg handed down the ruling. Next we will hear lefties repeat the ridiculous narrative - he meant no harm!
What is odd is you only going after NY and trying to make it some 'leftist' conspiracy, when there is plenty of talk around that Florida has done the same. Yet I see no outrage from you about Florida fudging the numbers. I guess having a republican governor and a Democratic governor makes the difference.
Thank you for saying that. I was thinking the same thing, but I didn't want to be accused of defending Cuomo.
Show us where Florida got called out by fudging covid deaths by it's AG. Nor did Florida send nursing home patients to their deaths the way Cuomo did.
We all knew about NY's nursing home deaths, yet the media glorified Cuomo.
I don't know much about Cuomo except what I see on the news. I know you know about him living in the area.
Imo what was happened in Florida is a lot more insidious. All the way down to the point of them raiding a house and taking all electronics.
Talk? Well, "talk" sure is the same thing as documented facts, isn't it?
"NEW YORK -- The Justice Department on Wednesday sent letters to the governors of New York and three other Democratic-led states, seeking data on whether they violated federal law by ordering public nursing homes to accept recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals — actions that have been criticized for potentially fueling the spread of the virus."
The New York order issued March 25, for example, specifically told homes they could not refuse to accept recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals as long as the patients were “medically stable.” The order barred homes from even testing such patients to see if they still had the virus. Some homes said they feared they would lose their licenses if they didn't comply.
The way it reads to me, not defending anything here, just saying what I think.
I believe there was a need to have a place to put recovering people as hospitals were filling up.
What better place than a place that is already equipped for it.
Do I think it was dumb to put them with clean patients? Yes.
They should have had a place specifically for recovering covid patients. Their own facility. Yet that would have involved moving people out and clearing people around. Still would have been better all around as they would have been isolated.
You must not be up on FL COVID news or the case of Rebekah Jones.
Florida routinely omitted COVID information and was more concerned with bending the data to meet reopening criteria rather than the other way around.
Remember when DeSantis would not allow COVID deaths of cruise ship passengers to be counted in Florida tallies whether or not they died on the cruise or in FL hospitals? Florida insists that those deaths be attributable to the decedents official residence.
They also were obfuscating data about nursing homes - was the death in a hospital attributable to the nursing home as the residence or not? Same issue as NY.
While not admitting to it, Florida did not start reporting COVID school data until September of 2020.
In the end, dead is dead and it really is only partisan BS as to where the death is recorded.
It's meaningless in the same vein as those who want to say the person with COVID on life support for weeks, died of cardiac arrest, no mention of COVID on the death cert.
I am working on two family member estates. Both had COVID with many underlying issues. Neither has COVID mentioned on the Death Cert. In one case, it was not the state's policy to test the deceased for COVID, they simply do not want to know ( NC ). In the other case, despite having every COVID symptom possible ( no taste or smell, fever, breathlessness) they said he was tested 2 months prior and was negative, they refused to "waste a test kit" when they were in such short supply.
So why split hairs of the under/over count.
The CDC knows this and only really reports the annual difference in increased deaths.
None of this bureaucratic or partisan BS matters to the dead.
That's sounds so oddly familiar:
"State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker defended the administration’s response Monday and said officials were worried about projections from global and federal public health experts of a surge of over 100,000 COVID-19 patients in New York at once. He said state regulations have long prevented nursing homes from admitting patients they couldn’t protect.
But as New York’s number of infections have plunged and plateaued in recent weeks, lawmakers grew frustrated Monday as Zucker declined to provide key data points sought by Democrats and Republicans, including a rough estimate of how many nursing home residents have died in hospitals of COVID-19. Zucker cited worry that those numbers could include double-counts of deaths.
“I will not provide information that I have not ensured is absolutely accurate,” Zucker said. “This is too big an issue and it’s too serious an issue.”
Since March, Cuomo and his administration have been tight-lipped about the extent of deaths and infections at the state’s 613 nursing homes, and the governor’s declined to admit any missteps. The state stopped releasing the total number of confirmed cases at nursing homes in mid-April, and didn’t release the number of deaths at individual nursing homes until early May."
They are all trying to deflect & obfuscate. They got away with it for a year with the help of their allies in the media, but not this time - know why?
Because New York's AG is making these claims!
And there isn't anyone who is going to defy her.
NY AG Letitia James - straight shooter
They even gave Cuomo an Emmy Award! Joe Scarborough called him "a leader!" He took no responsibility for all of those nursing home deaths. It was there for all to see and yet, as they always do, those on the left tried to turn black into white and red into green.
It's really pretty funny. They've been parroting a lie and cover up for months to protect Cuomo, and now that their lie has been comprehensively exposed, they pivot to the "at this point, what difference does it make?" defense, the last refuge of a liar.
And how is this different from Comey's FBI on October surprise on Hillary, that was wrong?
Remember - Comey cleared Hillary of any wrongdoing in the e-mail investigation, which was arguably a farce. The only reason Comey felt obliged to re-open the investigation was because Andrew McCabe was sitting on the discovery of Clinton e-mails on the Weiner laptop. Comey knew how that would look after the election if it came out. He protected the FBI's reputation. A reputation that has been obliterated.
That must be a conservative thing, lol
Goddamnit, just give accurate numbers. How in the hell are we supposed to know if something is working if we don't get accurate data. GIGO motherfuckers.
"Janice Dean , senior meteorologist for Fox News, went after NBC's Lester Holt on Saturday, claiming the "Nightly News" anchor censored a friend of hers in order to protect New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo .
Cuomo had faced backlash this week after an investigation by state Attorney General Letitia James found that deaths among elderly New Yorkers in nursing homes from the coronavirus pandemic were far worse than the figures disclosed by state officials.
"So [NBC News' Lester Holt] censored one of my friends who lost a loved one in a nursing home," Dean tweeted Saturday. "She wanted to say ‘[Andrew Cuomo] failed us’ in the interview and they told her to say ‘New York failed us’ instead. The mainstream is still protecting this guy. Disgusting."
Dean then called Holt and Cuomo a "disgrace," and said, "The governor, his administration and his health department failed us."
Holt had not publicly responded to Dean as of Saturday night.
Fox News also reached out to NBC News for a comment.
Dean, who lost both of her in-laws to the virus in New York nursing homes, has been critical of Cuomo and his coronavirus response, even prior to this week’s report.
The New York governor has been under increased scrutiny after the report found after surveying more than 60 nursing homes, that official reports "undercounted by as much as 50%" the number of seniors who died after contracting the disease in a nursing home.
The attorney general’s office is still investigating the discrepancies."
poor thing. moving from weather girl to news on FOX usually involves some painful carpet burns.
Sources and facts have an intimate relationship.