To summarize where we stand in our months-long effort to better understand the tragedy that is New York’s COVID-19 nursing home crisis -- and the Cuomo administration’s response to it – we now have a report from the state attorney general.
Prior to AG’s report, for example, we could not get a straight answer from Governor Cuomo, state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, or any other top Cuomo administration official on even the most straightforward question: How many COVID-19 deaths have there been in nursing home facilities and among those transferred from nursing homes who then died in hospitals?
For months, the Cuomo administration constantly pointed to its own number (the most recent being 8,677) and then utilized that number in daily briefings and elsewhere to tout New York State’s admirable standing in this regard in comparison to other states around the nation.
Except
that was false. Many of us long suspected that the number was much higher, that
it did not include the number of nursing home residents who were transferred
from a nursing facility to a hospital and died there. When we asked the
administration to provide that fuller number – including at a joint
Senate-Assembly hearing last August – the answer was: We’re working on it. It
went on like this for month after month after month.
And lo and behold, later on the very same day the AG’s report was released, the state produced new data confirming, in fact, that the preliminary total number of confirmed and presumed COVID deaths in nursing facilities and among nursing home residents who died after being transferred to a hospital was 12,743, or approximately 46 percent higher.
Why was the Cuomo administration able to suddenly produce, within hours, what many of us have been requesting for months?
Why did it take this outside report, which generated national attention, to finally get the governor to sit up straight?
Why was he couching the most basic facts on this tragedy for so long?
And, of course, what else is there that we still don’t know, but should know? Is it coincidence that the governor finally releases stats the very same day remarkably consistent with the AG’s findings? Is the AG’s report the full picture? Or is it an attempt to throw the dogs off the scent, so to speak?
The governor, in a follow-up press briefing last Friday, downplayed the report’s significance, said only “partisan politics” is behind any criticism of the state’s handling of the COVID-19 response in nursing homes, that New York is no different than any other state (still even better than most states, according to him), that the federal government was negligent, and so on.
The bottom line is that thanks to the AG’s report, we finally have a clear starting line. It is critical to know how many have died and where in order to better understand the why and how part of this tragedy that is going to help us put in place the policies that could prevent it from ever happening again.
That’s the purpose of accountability and transparency: better and stronger responses for the future.
This has been a tragedy and not just in New York State, we know that. The COVID-19 toll on the elderly, everywhere, is the great horror and the terrible sadness of this pandemic – which makes it all the more vital that we understand what has happened as fully as we possibly can, as straightforwardly as it takes, and with as much toughness as it demands.
It has been terrible everywhere and that reality includes the fact that it has been horrific here in New York State – much worse than Governor Cuomo was touting for months on end, for still unknown reasons.
The
attorney general’s report does not mark the end of this inquiry.
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The 58th Senate District, one of New York State's geographically largest legislative districts, encompasses the following five counties across the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes regions: Chemung, Schuyler, Steuben and Yates counties, and a portion of Tompkins County (the city and town of Ithaca, and the towns of Enfield, Newfield and Ulysses).
