With COVID-19 hospitalizations and daily caseloads decreasing both in New York and nationally, the office of the state’s attorney general on Thursday released the results of a distressing report, which found that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration undercounted COVID deaths at nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.
The report found that there were frequent inconsistencies between the number of deaths reported to the Health Department and the number reported to AG investigators. In the inquiry, Attorney General Letitia James’s office asked 62 nursing homes for records related to on-site and in-hospital COVID deaths, then cross-referenced that data with official numbers provided by the Health Department. The deaths reported to James’s office totaled 1,914, while the Health Department’s count was 1,229. The investigation looked at around a tenth of the state’s total of nursing homes, suggesting that the current number of 8,711 nursing home deaths is closer to 13,000.
The report could have considerable effects on how the state reckons with its COVID losses. On Thursday, James announced that her office is investigating around 20 nursing homes that “presented particular concern” as well as some instances “where the discrepancies cannot reasonably be accounted for by error.” It could also draw scrutiny toward why New York reported the nursing home deaths as two independent numbers, and renew focus on why Dr. Howard Zucker, the state’s health commissioner, has not released the number of nursing home residents who died due to COVID after being transferred to a hospital. It will also likely renew focus on a directive from the governor effectively requiring nursing homes to accept COVID patients from hospitals, potentially exposing vulnerable residents to the virus. And if the state count is closer to 13,000 than its current official tally, then New York would jump up from the state with the sixth-highest toll of nursing home deaths to number one.
As states rush to vaccinate nursing home residents who represent between a third and a fourth of nationwide COVID deaths, public-health officials are running into roadblocks. States including Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and Oklahoma have rerouted doses meant for long-term care facilities in order to speed up the overall vaccination. In Connecticut, D.C., Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia, many nursing home workers have opted out of early vaccination rounds, according to the Washington Post. “This is a forgotten workforce that hasn’t been treated well for years,” Harvard health professor David Grabowski told the Post. “We’ve been slow with [personal protective equipment], we’ve been slow with hazard pay, and all of a sudden now, they want to go fast with vaccinations . . . There’s good reason they’re so distrustful.”
