NURSING A GRUDGE
Cuo blames sick workers
Gov. Cuomo on Tuesday blamed sick nursing-home staffers for infecting residents at the facilities — as he doubled down in his defense of a controversial state order barring the facilities from turning away coronavirus positive patients.
“No, it wasn’t a mistake,” he insisted on MSNBC of his Health Department’s widely scrutinized March 25 mandate, which may have fueled more than 6,000 confirmed and presumed COVID-19 deaths.
“Because . . . you didn’t want to leave a senior citizen in the hospital for two weeks if you didn’t need to be in a hospital bed for two weeks,” he said.
The governor added, “By the time a person was transferred after nine or 10 days, they were no longer contagious and what all the data says is, the reason you had infections in nursing homes were because the staff brought in the infection.
“You look at the communities that had the high infection rate overall — those were the communities that had a high infection rate — so it is that the staff got infected. They came to work and they brought in the infection.”
Cuomo, who has in the past few weeks blamed party politics for criticism of his handling of the nursing homes during the pandemic — and even The Post for exposing the scandalous directive — pointed to how the state recently required coronavirus testing for all nursing-home employees twice a week. That mandate was revised on June 10, following industry pressure and Post reports that nursing homes were experiencing significant delays in receiving staff test results — or not getting them at all — and now facilities have to test staffers only once a week if their county has entered Phase Two of the Empire State’s reopening plan.
“But it’s very hard,” Cuomo insisted Tuesday. “All you need is one person — an air-conditioning repairman, a delivery person, and once that virus gets in the nursing home, it’s fire through dry grass.
“That’s where this virus preys,” Cuomo said, referring to nursing homes. “But in terms of learning lessons, look, there’s gonna be books written on lessons learned.”
However, the state Health Department allowed nurses and other staffers who tested positive, but were asymptomatic, to continue treating patients at nursing homes until the end of April.
The DOH didn’t reverse that order until The Post reported that sick staffers were permitted to work and treat residents at an upstate nursing home where more than a dozen died.
Staffers must now quarantine at home for 14 days before returning to work, per the edited state guidance issued April 29.
In May, Cuomo partially reversed the March 25 state order, mandating that patients in New York hospitals must now test negative for the coronavirus before they can be discharged to nursing homes.