Reply To: Blue States Coronavirus

Among the most deadly of Andrew Cuomo’s murderous policies has been the New York state directive that requires nursing homes take on new patients infected with COVID-19 — which caused further spread of infection contributing to the deaths of over 5,300 people in New York’s nursing homes. And the toll has still been increasing by an average of 20 to 25 deaths a day for the past few weeks.

New York has faced intense criticism for a March 25 state health department directive requiring nursing homes to take recovering coronavirus patients. “A number of nursing homes have felt constrained by the order and admitted hospital discharged patients without knowing what their COVID status was,” said Chris Laxton, executive director of the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine. “This order made an already difficult situation almost impossible.”

The order, similar to one in neighboring New Jersey, was intended to help free up hospital beds for the sickest patients as cases surged. But critics noted that nursing homes were already overwhelmed and a better solution would have been sending them to the virtually empty Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which was retrofitted to treat COVID-19 patients under President Trump’s order, or an even less utilized Navy hospital that President Trump sent to New York.

As the virus was racing through his nursing home, the head of Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill Health Center frantically emailed state health officials April 9 asking just that. “Is there a way for us to send our suspected covid cases to the Javitz center or the ship?” Donny Tuchman wrote. Tuchman said he was denied permission. Eventually, more than 50 residents at his home would die. Added Democrat state Assemblyman Ron Kim: “We could have figured out how to isolate these folks. We failed to do that.”

“Throwing in new residents who may or may not have been stable at that point could not possibly have been to the benefit of any facility,” said Dr. Roy Goldberg, medical director of the Kings Harbor Multicare Center, a nursing home in the Bronx that has seen 56 deaths. “The way this has been handled by the state is totally irresponsible, negligent and stupid,” said Elaine Mazzotta, a nurse whose mother died last month of suspected COVID-19 at a Long Island nursing home. “They knew better. They shouldn’t have sent these people into nursing homes.”

When Cuomo faced criticism at a recent briefing, he said that providing masks and gowns to nursing homes is “not our job” because the homes are privately owned. “It was such an insensitive thing to say,” said state Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat who noted that it wasn’t until just this past week that New York and neighboring states announced a plan to combine forces to buy protective gear and medical supplies for nursing homes. “If we had focused on that early on,” he said, “we could have saved a lot of lives.”

One key criticism is that New York took weeks after the first known care home outbreaks to begin publicly reporting the number of deaths in individual homes — and still doesn’t report the number of cases. By the time New York began disclosing the deaths in the middle of last month, the state had several major outbreaks with at least 40 deaths each, most of which were a surprise to the surrounding communities and even some family members. “They should have announced to the public: ‘We have a problem in nursing homes. We’re going to help them, but you need to know where it is,’” said former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, who now heads the nonprofit Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. “Instead, they took the opposite tack: They hid it.”

Further, there has been a lack of testing in several recent New York outbreaks, including one that killed 98 residents, many of whom died with COVID-19 symptoms without ever being tested. Unlike West Virginia, New York has not mandated testing in its more than 1,150 nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Nor has Cuomo followed the lead of such states as Maryland, Florida, Tennessee and Wisconsin in dispatching National Guard teams to homes to conduct testing, triage and some care.