Report: Gov aides got nursing home COVID data omitted

State Health Department officials omitted from a public report full data about COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes at the behest of Gov. Cuomo’s top advisers, it was reported Thursday.

As a result, the report issued in July counted only people who died in nursing homes — and didn’t include people sickened in nursing homes who later died in hospitals, The Wall Street Journal said.

The report said 6,432 nursing home residents had died of the disease — far fewer than the the actual nursing home death toll, the Journal reported.

In a statement provided to the Daily News, state Health Department spokesman Gary Holmes said the agency was comfortable with omitting the full death information from the July report because the hospital deaths had not been verified.

“The decision was made to initially release the report without the out of facility data and to later update the report to include the out of facility deaths,” Holmes said.

The July report said that when the virus did get into nursing homes, it came from nursing home staffers who did not realize they were carrying the disease.

In their statements, Cuomo and other officials in his administration said the data’s omission from the report didn’t affect the report’s main conclusion, which was that a March 25, 2020 Health Department order that required nursing homes to take in certain COVID-19 patients did not contribute to the death toll.

For months, Health Department officials and others in Gov. Cuomo’s administration resisted calls to release full data about the nursing home deaths.

Late in January, Attorney General Letitia James issued a study that accused the Cuomo administration of undercounting the number of nursing home deaths by as much as 50%.

The state now puts the number of nursing home deaths at over 15,000. Previously, the state reported only about 8,500 deaths.

A request for comment to Cuomo’s office was not immediately returned Thursday night.