. . . and Zucker, Too

State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker’s approach to the coronavirus crisis in nursing homes is even worse than we’d thought: It turns out his Department of Health didn’t even try to track deaths in homes for a full month after the state reported its first fatalities.

New York’s first confirmed COVID-19 deaths came March 14, but it wasn’t until April 16 that DOH asked a single nursinghome administrator how many residents had died of the disease, the Syracuse PostStandard has revealed.

The department was in contact — sending daily questionnaires asking how many masks and how much hand sanitizer homes had on hand, among other data. But it wasn’t until news broke of growing outrage among residents’ families that the state thought to ask the most crucial question.

And then DOH just flailed: It e-mailed homes on April 17 at 7:03 a.m. to ask, “What is the total number of residents who have died in your nursing home of COVID-19?” It set an 8:45 a.m. deadline for replies.

The next day, it ordered administrators to document every coronavirus death over the prior six weeks — in a noon e-mail with a 2:30 p.m. deadline.

All this, as Zucker mandated on March 25 that homes take in COVID-positive patients. That’s right: He gave that order without having even tried to learn how many residents were dying from the bug. (Then again, this is the guy who ordered EMTs to not bother trying to resuscitate heart-attack victims until The Post exposed that madness.)

Zucker seems to have focused purely on keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, to the point of sending infected patients into the facilities housing those most vulnerable to the bug. Now the virus has taken some 5,600 nursing-home lives, and experts believe the true toll is far higher.

Gov. Cuomo has repeatedly insisted his team is basing all its moves on the data, yet Zucker wasn’t even collecting key info on the most at-risk population. Surely the Empire State deserves a better health commissioner than this.