Self sabotage
In the darkest time of COVID, at Gov. Cuomo’s famous daily briefings, he would offer grim numbers about virus fatalities, breaking out deaths in hospitals, and deaths in nursing homes. On April 25, he reported 349 hospital deaths and 18 nursing home deaths. On April 26, there were 313 hospital deaths and 24 nursing home deaths. On April 29, 287 hospital deaths and 19 in nursing homes.
The numbers were technically correct, but another important subset was hidden from public view: The numbers of nursing home residents who were succumbing to COVID in hospitals.
According to data obtained by former Daily Newser Bill Hammond, which he had to sue the state to get after bureaucrats stonewalled his public records request, overall deaths among nursing home residents were ultimately many thousands higher. Of those 349 hospital deaths on April 25, more than half, 181, were nursing home residents. On April 26, again more than half, 165 of the 313 people who were hospital fatalities, had lived in nursing homes. The same on April 29, 158 nursing home residents had perished in hospitals, a majority of the 287 hospital-attributed deaths that day.
State health officials claimed for months they couldn’t release the complete toll of fatalities among this vulnerable population because they were still tallying them up. That seems less and less the truth as two new disturbing reports from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal indicate they knew the real nursing home resident death data all along, and buried the stats.
The newspapers show that a July 6 state Department of Health study, intended to answer critics’ questions about whether a March 25 directive requiring nursing homes accept patients regardless of COVID diagnosis had caused more deaths, was lowballed. A draft version, which included all nursing home residents, regardless of where they died, put the figure above 9,000. But the final study was stripped down to 6,432, only counting those who died inside nursing homes’ walls. Two of Cuomo’s most senior aides, Melissa DeRosa and Linda Lacewell, neither a public health expert, chose to publish the lower number.
The lower number, 6,432, was used by Cuomo again and again to claim that “we’re number 46 in the nation in terms of percentage of deaths at nursing homes, compared to the total percentage.”
The 9,000-plus figure that his aides considered too inaccurate to publish turned out to be pretty much the correct accounting. Trying to stall its release helped no one, and did significant damage to Cuomo’s COVID legacy.