Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s directive for New York nursing homes to admit Covid-19 patients increased the pandemic death toll among residents, according to a new report in the New York Post.
The Post’s story is based on a new, 242-page report from the New York State Bar Association Task Force on Nursing Homes and Long-Term Care. The report criticized Cuomo for not reversing his March 2020 order earlier than he did.
“Although a determination of the number of additional nursing home deaths is beyond the capacity of the task force, there are credible reviews that suggest that the directive, for the approximately six weeks that it was in effect, did lead to some number of additional deaths,” the report says, according to the Post.
Cuomo has faced criticism over the state’s response to the pandemic in nursing homes for months. Opponents have long focused on the March order as a key mistake.
The mandate required nursing homes to admit medically stable patients who had Covid-19 in an effort to free up hospital beds. At the time, state officials were worried about running out of hospital space.
The rule was in effect from March 25 to May 10 of 2020. After that, hospital patients had to test negative for the coronavirus before they could be admitted to nursing homes.
The task force’s report relies in part on a study by the Empire Center for Public Policy, which tied “several hundred and possibly more than 1,000” deaths of nursing home residents to the order, the Post said.
Others aren’t so sure the order can be blamed for increasing the death toll.
Cuomo’s policy was ill-advised, some experts say. And there are still plenty of questions about how the health department supervised nursing homes during the pandemic.
But the simple notion that by sending Covid-19 patients to nursing homes Cuomo flooded them with virus and caused thousands of unnecessary deaths does not hold up, according to reporting from syracuse.com earlier this year.
READ MORE: Why ‘Cuomo’s death order’ didn’t really cause NY’s nursing home carnage. A reality check
A Health Department spokesperson said the new report is another example of politicians pushing political agendas and personal vendettas, according to the Post.
“This latest report, like others before it, supports what we’ve said all along, that New York was blind-sided and got hit the hardest, that when Covid got into communities it quickly and quietly spread from asymptomatic staff into nursing homes, and that New York’s nursing home experience was not unlike that of other states,” the spokesperson said, according to the Post.
The FBI is investigating the nursing home issue. And the state Assembly launched an impeachment probe. Cuomo is also facing investigations into multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
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