Influencing death stats
State nursing home numbers may tell different story
The recent feeding frenzy over the “number of nursing home deaths” demonstrates the abandonment of reason and the abuse of statistics. There are four groups demanding investigations and blood. They are lawyers and their clients who hope to include New York state in wrongful death cases, politicians (mostly Republicans and Attorney “I want to be governor” General Letitia James) who want to hurt Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo anyway they can, the media who are unable to employ reason to counter their outrage addiction, and unions who want new staffing mandates in nursing homes.
I don’t like Cuomo, but that is no reason to buy into statistical manipulation and characterization that is overly simplistic.
First of all, the terms “underreported” or “undercounted” are being consciously misused. There is no underreporting by the state, merely the reporting of deaths in different categories than what lawyers, politicians, unions and the media want them reported.
Reporting deaths is far more complicated than you might think. The Times Uion, in a recent story on the City Mission, mentioned that a client seeking warmth, came in the other day, sat down and promptly died. The staff called the paramedics. Now where and when that poor individual gets officially declared dead, and whether there is an autopsy that will determine if he died from COVID -19, and what column the death is eventually recorded in is anybody’s guess.
We know that meatpacking and other food processing plants have been hotbeds of COVID, but nobody lives at meat processing plants. It took unions, surveying their own members that first related both cases and deaths to meatpacking plants.
What about old nuns? They have been dying of COVID by droves all over the country and Albany County (the Times Union recently reported nine older nuns dead of COVID in Michigan just in January, and at least 10 older nuns in Albany County.). Where’s the outrage? Where are the 2-inch headlines: “Who’s killing older nuns of America?” Where’s the investigation of the Catholic Church?
Oh, that’s right, nuns have no children to file wrongful death suits. They can’t vote anymore and their deaths can’t be used to hurt Andrew Cuomo. They died in private care homes that don’t have to staff or report the same way as nursing homes. Nobody is going to look into it because nobody is going to get anything out of it.
Let’s return to statistics on nursing home deaths and my home county of Allegany. There were no COVID deaths in Allegany County during the time of Cuomo’s questioned policy.
But as of Dec. 22, 2020, the county was reporting 52 COVID deaths with 47 coming from nursing homes. (Current “revised figures show 55 in-county deaths with another 25 residents dying outside the county.) How is it possible that at least 90 percent and probably closer to 95 percent of all COVID deaths in Allegany County relate to nursing home residents without the evil intervention of Governor Death?
Comparative state statistics could be used to support a theory that Governor Cuomo actually saved lives by transferring patients back to nursing homes. We forget that nobody knew what the hell they were doing at the beginning of the pandemic.
Remember hydroxychloroquine? Remember how, as hospitals got swamped, there was a mistaken overuse of ventilators? We also tend to forget that hospital emergency rooms, COVID wards and ICU rooms were understaffed, and perhaps more importantly, suffering from mind-numbing fatigue and overwork.
It is entirely possible that getting people out of understaffed hospitals with overuse of ventilators and debilitating work hours and loads and sending them back to understaffed nursing homes with poorly trained employees may have saved lives. My doctor-brother long ago taught me the hospital rules of three: “If your stay is three days or less, we are likely to do you a world of good; if it extends to up to three weeks, you only have a 50-50 chance of getting out, and if we keep you more than three weeks, we will find a way to kill you.”
I can’t go into all the variables and complexities, but let’s just say when the discussion devolves down to
North Country Proud Girl Elise Stefanik, who with two good hands can’t count how many people died at the Capitol insurrection, uses the statistics of the AG’S report as proof that Andrew Cuomo is the spawn of Satan, we are so far removed from reason and logic that we are destined to learn nothing from any study of nursing home deaths.
Comparative state statistics could be used to support a theory that Governor Cuomo actually saved lives by transferring patients back to nursing homes. We forget that nobody knew what the hell they were doing at the beginning of the pandemic. Remember hydroxychloroquine?