Not Shocked
Cuomo’s directive to send elderly people with COVID-19 into nursing homes led to a spike in deaths, reports the non-profit Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank. The report tied “several hundred and possibly more than 1,000” fatalities to the decision, which was ordered on March 25, 2020, and rescinded less than two months later on May 10.
“The findings contradict a central conclusion of the state Department of Health’s (DOH) July 6 (2020) report on coronavirus in nursing homes, which said, among other things: ‘Admission policies were not a significant factor in nursing home fatalities,’ and ‘the data do not show a consistent relationship between admissions and increased mortality,’” according to a draft report prepared by the Empire Center. Cuomo has used the DOH report to dodge responsibility for the deaths since its release.
Like Fire in Dry Grass
The DOH report primarily blamed the spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes on infected but asymptomatic staffers and visitors, and has repeatedly been cited by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to deny any responsibility — even though he himself had warned on March 29, four days after his fateful directive, that “Coronavirus in a nursing home is like fire in dry grass.” No kidding, Andy. Then why did you do it? Why didn’t you stop it sooner? Perhaps because using the USS Comfort, the Jacob Javits Convention Center, and the various field hospitals would have handed Trump a media victory?
Related: Nursing Home ‘Patients Will Die’: Staff Warned NJ Commissioner About COVID-19 Order
Confidence Level of 99 Percent
The Empire Center said it arrived at its conclusions by comparing the death rates at facilities that admitted COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals to the rates at others that didn’t, then crunching the numbers to “a statistical confidence level of 99 percent.” All of the info for their report came from the DOH’s July 2020 report.
The study found that nursing homes outside New York City and its suburbs took the brunt of the order, with each one that accepted COVID-19 patients averaging 9.3 more deaths than those that did not.
Bill Hammond, the center’s senior fellow for health policy and author of the damning report, said the policy “clearly did make some difference and it made a bad situation worse.”
Hammond also said the data he reviewed “raises more questions about the credibility of the Health Department’s analysis” in its July 2020 report, which blamed asymptomatic staffers for spreading COVID.
This comes after another scathing report that Cuomo and his peeps weren’t honest about COVID-related nursing home deaths and had perhaps under-reported them by as much as 50%.
Cuomo Plays The Victim
The New York Post reporting on Cuomo has been a thorn in his cloven hoof, to the point Cuomo suggested the Post’s Trump-loving staff’s objective was to “kill all Democrats.”
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