An Impossible Mandate?

Gov. Cuomo’s order that nursing homes test their staff twice a week is starting to look like pure butt-covering for his team’s disastrous earlier miscues. For starters, it seems the state Department of Health didn’t even consider if that level of testing is possible right now.

Less than a week after the mandate came down, The Post reports, New York’s top COVID testing lab, the Wadsworth Center, finds itself so overwhelmed it’s experiencing delays of “several weeks” — and told counties to stop sending test shipments from nursing homes.

“We’re honestly really at a loss,” Jennifer Rodriguez, the public-health director for Livingston County, told The Post. “This is nothing short of inexcusable,” said Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro.

Department of Health spokesman Gary Holmes told The Post that the state has “identified commercial labs which have capacity to run tens of thousands of tests a day to support this important directive.”

But at a cost — at least $100 a test. With 160,000 nursing-home and 45,000 assistedliving staffers statewide, twice-weekly tests mean 410,000 kits a week. Wadsworth has been processing just over 6,000 tests a week. Sending all kits to private labs would cost a minimum of $41 million a week.

That’s if they get the swabs, that is. DOH says it’s sent “more than 440,000 test kits to counties, test sites and health care facilities” — but that’s barely enough for a week’s mandated tests for nursing homes alone.

Empire State nursing homes have racked up 2,787 confirmed COVID-19 deaths and another 2,646 presumed. Yet Cuomo claims he and his team “did everything we could” to protect those most vulnerable to the virus — ignoring the March 25 edict forcing homes to admit virus-positive patients.

The gov charges that calls for an independent probe into his team’s handling of the crisis in nursing homes are “gratuitous politics.” Sadly, that label is actually suited to his damage-control efforts.