Cuomo’s order that sent COVID-19 patients to nursing homes is responsible for the high death count in New York according to the non-profit Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank.
The report claims that Cuomo’s policy led to hundreds of possible 1,000 more deaths than would have occurred without that policy. That is a scathing indictment of the policy adopted by Democratic governors but rejected by Republican governors.
The report says:
“The findings contradict a central conclusion of the state Department of Health’s (DOH) July 6 (2020) report on coronavirus in nursing homes, which said, among other things: ‘Admission policies were not a significant factor in nursing home fatalities,’ and ‘the data do not show a consistent relationship between admissions and increased mortality.’”
The DOH report primarily blamed the spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes not on Cuomo sending COVID patients into nursing homes but made the absurd claim that the disease was spread by healthcare workers and visitors.
We don’t know if staffers or visitors had COVID but we know for a fact that COVID patients had the disease. So why blame it on the unknown when the known is very scary.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, himself warned four days after his directive that “Coronavirus in a nursing home is like fire in dry grass.”
The Empire Center for Public Policy reached its conclusion by crunching the numbers of nursing homes that allowed COVID patients and those that didn’t. They were able to come up with a conclusion with a 99% confidence rating. That does not leave much room to defend Cuomo but you know the media will anyway. They are not concerned with the deaths of others but are indignant when they see one of their own merely insulted.
The study found that nursing homes outside New York City and its suburbs took the brunt of the order, with each one that accepted COVID-19 patients averaging 9.3 more deaths than those that did not.
Bill Hammond, the center’s senior fellow for health policy and author of the damning report, said the policy “clearly did make some difference and it made a bad situation worse.”
Hammond also said the data he reviewed “raises more questions about the credibility of the Health Department’s analysis” in its July 2020 report, which blamed asymptomatic staffers for spreading COVID.
