Health big grilled on care home ills
ALBANY — Health Commissioner Howard Zucker was on the hot seat Monday as state lawmakers grilled him about New York’s handling of nursing homes and long-term care facilities during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Zucker defended Cuomo administration policies and data collection during an attimes heated hearing that focused on how the state has counted the number of nursing home residents who died from COVID-19 over the past five months.
“I know that you want a number, and I wish I could give you the number today, but I need to be sure it’s absolutely accurate,” Zucker said when asked by Sen. James Skoufis (D-Rockland) about the exact number of elderly New Yorkers who have died.
New York has reported nearly 6,500 elder care facility deaths, but that number does not include infected residents who died at hospitals or others who were presumed to have died from the virus.
Several other lawmakers, including Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx), the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, pressed Zucker for more information.
“It seems, Sir, that you are choosing the information so that you can look better,” Rivera said.
Democrats and Republicans alike quizzed Zucker, who took questions for nearly three hours, about visitor policies and a controversial guidance mandating nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients.
Gov. Cuomo has repeatedly bristled at criticism of the state’s March 25 directive that long-term care facilities accept coronavirus-positive residents as long as they had the ability to care for them, calling backlash to the policy “politically motivated.”
The hearing came a month after the Cuomo administration released an in-house analysis that found employee-spread infections were the most likely reason for infections in nursing homes, not the admission policy.
New York has roughly 100,000 nursing home residents living in 613 facilities. A total of 37,000 of the 150,000 nursing home workers at the sites have tested positive for COVID-19 at some point, Zucker said.
He echoed the state-issued report, maintaining that infections likely spread through nursing homes before the admission order was even in place.
“We looked at the facts and will continue to do so, and as we look at COVID-19, we will refine how we respond,” he said. “But we will always make our decision based on the best science available at the time.”
Some 545 people tested positive for the virus on Sunday as the state conducted about 51,000 tests, a 1% infection rate that has remained steady for weeks. The state reported just three coronavirus deaths, a far cry from the daily tolls of close to 1,000 that the state experienced in April.
While Cuomo and his administration have enjoyed national praise for their leadership during the pandemic, lawmakers appeared frustrated by a lack of nursing home data. The state stopped releasing the total number of confirmed cases at nursing homes in mid-April as New York became the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., and officials didn’t release the number of deaths at individual nursing homes until early May.