Gov. Andrew Cuomo denied this week that his state Health Department’s controversial March 25 order saying nursing homes could not bar admission or readmission to a resident based on a positive COVID-19 test had anything to do with the over 6,500 deaths in those facilities related to the virus.
“That’s not why they lost a loved one in a nursing home. Your question — the premise of your question is just actually wrong. People were lost in nursing homes, were lost because that’s where the virus preys.
“The virus preys on senior citizens,” insisted Cuomo, reprimanding a Finger Lakes News Radio reporter during a phone conference call with other members of the media on Wednesday.
“There’s a whole report done with data. The way the virus got into nursing homes was from two possible carriers — before we even knew about it,” continued the governor, ignoring the seeming impossibility of infected staffers at one nursing home having any impact on all the others.
“The staff, working staff, at the nursing home brought in the virus, or potentially family members before we stopped family visits brought in the virus and this happened at a time back in February when we didn’t even know the virus was circulating in New York State, that’s how the virus got into the nursing home,” he added.
Cuomo has defensively pointed to an internal report conducted by his own state Health Department and widely criticized by medical experts, politicians and family members who lost loved ones in facilities to the virus.
Experts like Catherine Troisi, an epidemiologist with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, ripped the DOH-issued report released in July, arguing the analysis lacked sufficient information including data on nursing homes that were free of the deadly disease before being forced to admit infected patients.
“Would this get published in an academic journal? No,” Troisi told the Associated Press at the time.
Cuomo however reversed the policy on May 10, announcing hospitals could no longer send patients into nursing homes with a positive coronavirus case following a visit.
At the time, he argued the former policy was put into place to prevent discrimination against sick patients upon admission or readmission by facilities.
Presently, 6,484 nursing home residents have died in facilities since March of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to the latest DOH data published Oct. 1. An additional 304 individuals succumbed to the disease in adult care facilities.
“If you’d actually like to understand some facts, I’ll have them send you a full report that was done and then you can help people with the facts,” Cuomo added cheekily to the upstate-based reporter.
“Ignorance doesn’t help grieving people. The rule that the State had which was from the CDC guidance, right? The State didn’t make it up, they were following the CDC guidance. Now you can say, well, State Health Department was stupid to follow the federal guidance and you may have a point there,” he added.
“But the rules said the nursing home can’t discriminate on the basis of COVID. The law also said a nursing home cannot accept a person who they cannot treat effectively while protecting the other residents. That’s the law.”
“We never scrambled for beds and we never needed nursing home beds because we always had hospital beds so it just never happened in New York where we needed to say to a nursing home we need you to take this person even though they’re COVID-positive,” Cuomo added.
“It never happened. We had extra beds. We had extra beds at Javits. We had extra beds at emergency hospitals that we put up all across the state so it just never happened that we needed a nursing home to take a COVID-positive person. It never happened that we needed a nursing home to take a COVID positive person. It never happened.”
Critics have argued however that the state’s order went beyond federal guidance, and that it was not clear that facilities had the choice to send sick patients to other facilities as a plan B if they were unable to cohort infected individuals or provide adequate.
The DOH denied a desperate request from Cobble Hill Health Center in Brownstone Brooklyn CEO Donny Tuchman in April, when he emailed the agency asking if there was “a way for us to send our suspected COVID patients” to the Jacob Javits Center, or the US naval hospital ship USNS Comfort — but the request was denied.
Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Flushing) — a frequent critic of the governor’s policy and chief sponsor of legislation that would authorize an independent probe into the state’s handling of the crisis in these facilities was not convinced.
“The governor and his administration are stuck trying to figure out which lies they need to defend and how best to gaslight the public to believe that they did everything to save nursing home lives,” he said.
“We need the governor to tell the truth and own up to his mistakes.”
Senior advisor to the governor, Rich Azzopardi, bit back: “Anyone who bothered to read the transcript would know the Governor was crystal clear and was saying what didn’t happen was the crunch on hospital beds that every projection especially the federal government’s projections predicted.
“Separately the law has always been that nursing homes could only accept residents that they could adequately care for. None of that has changed. Those who continue politicize this issue in a shoddy attempt to deflect from the federal government’s incompetent and disastrous pandemic response should be ashamed of themselves and every media organization should hold them accountable for what they are trying to do.”
Meanwhile, good government group the Empire Center for Public Policy filed a lawsuit arguing the DOH is illegally withholding information about the number of nursing home residents who died of COVID-19 in hospitals so it can intentionally undercount deaths.
And even CNN fact checked the governor’s claims.
“Cuomo’s assertion that ‘it never happened’ is false,” the fact-check read. “According to a report from the New York State Department of Health, ‘6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to [nursing home] facilities’ following Cuomo’s mandate that nursing homes accept the readmission of Covid-positive patients from hospitals. Whether or not this was ‘needed,’ it did in fact happen.”
That fact-check was shared by CNN anchor Jake Tapper.
https://nypost.com/2020/10/02/it-never-happened-gov-cuomo-denies-causing-nursing-home-deaths/
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.