Nixes ‘nursing’ databid
Gov. Cuomo has refused a request by congressional Republicans to provide documents and a staff briefing regarding the state’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in nursing homes.
“The nursing homes is just pure politics,” he said on WAMC’s “The Roundtable” Thursday afternoon, adding a jab at The Post and its ownership.
“And it’s frankly the New York Post . . . it’s Rupert Murdoch and pro-Trump propaganda. They don’t want to talk about what the federal government did on the COVID, so they want to attack the Democrats for nursing-home deaths.”
Murdoch owns News Corp., which is The Post’s parent company.
On Monday, Rep. Steve Scalise, the top Republican on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, sent a letter to Cuomo and five other Democratic governors requesting documents pertaining to nursing-home data.
The letter — signed by Scalise (La.) and other House Republicans but no Democrats — gave the governors until Thursday to provide information, including the total number of COVID-19positive people transferred from hospitals to nursing homes during the pandemic and the total number of nursing-home resident deaths that occurred in hospitals.
The state Health Department stopped reporting that data in May.
Scalise and Republican Rep. Tom Reed, of upstate Corning, also held an online press conference demanding the data, arguing that decisions made early on in the outbreak by Cuomo’s health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, potentially increased the state’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes — now at 6,200.
“We want to find out: How many thousands — we know the number is well over 2,000 of those nursing-home residents — died after the CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] guidelines came out and after Governor Cuomo contradicted those guidelines by forcing the nursing homes to take them back without allowing them to even test those nursing-home residents for COVID?” Scalise said.
Cuomo’s Health Department, headed by Zucker, issued a March 25 order barring nursing homes from denying COVID-19-positive patients transfers from hospitals to nursing homes.
Cuomo and health officials have repeatedly defended the order, using a variety of justifications.
They have blamed the homes, labeling them as greedy and not wanting to lose the income from filled bed, and they have blamed the Trump administration, claiming to have been merely following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nursing homes have said they were bound by the state directive and had no choice but to take in the patients.
The directive was walked back on May 10.
Scalise said he is regularly talking to CMS Administrator Seema Verma, who has said Cuomo’s original order strayed from federal guidance.
“So they’re going back, COVID positive, and they’re infecting other nursing-home residents and thousands of nursing-home residents died. These were all preventable,” Scalise said.
“We want to know how many, because unfortunately, New York stopped disclosing the data.”