From the AP/Yahoo:
“Over 9,000
virus patients sent into NY nursing homes”
More than 9,000
recovering coronavirus patients in New York state were released from hospitals
into nursing homes early in the pandemic under a controversial order that was
scrapped amid criticisms it accelerated outbreaks, according to new records
obtained by The Associated Press.
The new number
of 9,056 recovering patients sent to hundreds of nursing homes is more than 40%
higher than what had been previously released by the state health department.
And it raises new questions as to whether Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25
directive helped spread sickness and death among residents, a charge his
administration disputes. “The lack of transparency and the meting out of bits
of important data has undermined our ability to both recognize the scope and
severity of what’s going on,” said Richard Mollot, the executive director of
the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a residents advocacy group. The new
figures come as the Cuomo administration has been forced in recent weeks to
acknowledge that the overall number of COVID-19 deaths among long-term care
residents is nearly 15,000, up from the 8,500 previously disclosed.
Cuomo’s March
25 directive requiring nursing homes to take recovering COVID-19 patients was
intended to free up space in hospitals swamped in the early days of the
pandemic. It came under criticism from advocates for nursing home residents and
their relatives for the potential to spread the virus in a state that at the
time already had the nation’s highest nursing home death toll. In its reply to
an AP Freedom of Information request from May, the state health department this
week released two figures: a previously released count of 6,327 admissions of
patients directly from hospitals and a new count of 2,729 “readmissions” of
patients sent back from a hospital to the nursing home where they had lived
before.
Critics have
long argued there were many other places those patients could have been sent,
including New York City’s Jacob Javits Convention Center, which had been set up
as a makeshift hospital, and the USS Comfort military hospital ship. The state
contends those facilities were not suitable for such patients. Cuomo reversed
the directive May 10, barring nursing homes from accepting COVID-19 patients
without a negative test first. State health officials contend that asymptomatic
nursing home employees, not recovering COVID patients, were the driving factor
in nursing home outbreaks. And they have repeatedly noted that by law, nursing
homes weren’t supposed to accept anyone they couldn’t adequately care for. “At
least 98% of nursing home facilities in the state had COVID in their facility
before their first admission or readmission, and as we’ve seen across the
nation, the major driver of infections appears to be from asymptomatic staff
through no fault of their own," said state Health Commissioner Dr. Howard
Zucker in a statement to the AP. He added that the March 25 order followed
federal guidance. Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California
Association of Long Term Care Medicine, said state officials are seeking to
shift blame. “There has never been any question in my mind that sending
COVID-19 patients into completely unprepared, understaffed and underresourced
nursing homes both increased transmission and led to a greater number of
deaths,” Wasserman said.
New York's
health department in July released a 33-page report, heavily criticized by
health experts and resident advocates, that said patients sent to homes posed
little danger to residents because they had spent an average nine days at the
hospitals — the same period that it likely takes for the virus to no longer be
contagious. Some states, including Connecticut, set up COVID 19-only nursing
homes relatively early on, something that didn’t initially happen in New York. New
York Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker told lawmakers in a letter this week
that state started working in November to establish COVID-only nursing homes
for some “persistently positive” patients coming out of hospitals. There are
now 19 such homes statewide, totaling nearly 2,000 beds. Cuomo, who wrote a
book about his leadership in handling the pandemic in his state, has repeatedly
downplayed such criticism of his administration’s handling of nursing homes in
the crisis as a politically motivated “blame game." But the flurry of new
disclosures began last month after state Attorney General Letitia James, a
fellow Democrat issued a blistering report accusing the administration of
underreporting its long-term care deaths by more than 50%. That was consistent
with an AP report from August that focused on the fact that New York is one of
the only states that counts just those who died on nursing home property and not
those who died after being transported to hospitals. Under heavy pressure to
change its methodology, New York began issuing reports in recent days that
added thousands more to its long-term care death toll since March. That lifted
the total dead to nearly 15,000 from about 8,500 last month. The new data also
confirmed that COVID-19 deaths at some nursing homes are double or more what
had been previously reported. Cuomo has repeatedly used the lower death figures
previously reported to cast his administration’s response to the pandemic in a
favorable light, noting that nursing home deaths compared with total deaths in
the state were lower than nearly every other state. The new data shows that
claim was wrong. They put nursing home resident deaths at 36% of New York’s
total deaths, roughly the average for the country as a whole.
^ Sadly, this
new number doesn’t surprise me. Cuomo and NYS has failed New Yorkers and those
in Nursing Homes. It wouldn’t surprise me if the number of infected people he
forced into Nursing Homes continues to rise. ^
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.