SCANDAL! New York Quietly Admits It Undercounted Nursing Home Deaths, Changed Reporting Rules

Cuomo has come under fire for requiring nursing homes to accept patients with COVID-19.

This is how most, if not all, of the nursing home outbreaks began.

While Cuomo has reversed the policy, he has come short of saying it was wrong or that he was mistaken.

But now, a new scandal is errupting over New York's quiet revision to its COVID-19 counting methodology.

The Daily Caller was the first to break this scandal:

New York has omitted an unknown number of coronavirus deaths in recent reports regarding residents of nursing home and adult care facilities, the New York State Department of Health acknowledged in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In early May, those reports quietly began omitting long-term care residents who died of coronavirus in hospitals. Even so, New York still leads the nation with 5,433 reported deaths at nursing homes and adult care facilities as of Wednesday.

The revelation comes as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faces criticism for ordering nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept patients from hospitals who had tested positive for coronavirus. Cuomo rescinded the March 25 order, which experts say led to higher levels of death among nursing home residents, on May 11 to allow such facilities to wait until a coronavirus patient tests negative before readmitting them.

The NYSDOH confirmed to the DCNF that until around April 28, it was disclosing coronavirus deaths for all nursing home and adult care facility residents, regardless of whether the patient died at their long-term care facility or at a hospital.

But the department made a subtle change to its disclosures beginning around May 3, according to web archives. The NYSDOH told the DCNF its disclosure now only reports coronavirus deaths for long-term care patients that died while physically present at their facility.

New York’s coronavirus tracker “currently does not include out of facility deaths,” NYSDOH spokeswoman Jill Montag told the DCNF. “Deaths of nursing home and adult care facility residents that occurred at hospitals is accounted for in the overall fatality data on our COVID-19 tracker.”

In other words, New York’s nursing home and adult care facility coronavirus deaths tracker omits any individuals who contracted coronavirus while living at a long-term care facility but died in a hospital.

Montag told the DCNF that the state is opting to not disclose out of facility deaths “in order to maintain consistency and reliability in the data as presented, and to avoid any potential for double-counting.”

But the reporting change has, in fact, resulted in inconsistencies in New York’s disclosure of long-term care coronavirus fatalities, particularly regarding deaths of residents of adult care facilities, which don’t typically don’t have the medical capacity of nursing homes or hospitals.

New York reported on April 28 that there had been 644 deaths from residents of adult care facility residents who died at either the facility or at a hospital. Montag confirmed that the table “contained lab-confirmed and, in some cases, presumed COVID-19 deaths.”

But on May 13, after the state ceased disclosing long-term care residents who died at hospitals, New York reported a total of 165 coronavirus-confirmed and presumed deaths at adult care facilities — a reduction of 479 deaths from its disclosure 16 days prior.

Of the nine states with the largest coronavirus outbreaks at long-term care facilities, according to a New York Times tracker, New York is the only state that omits the deaths of residents who died at hospitals from its reporting.

Spokespeople for the health departments of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts confirmed to the DCNF that their disclosures include coronavirus deaths of long-term care residents regardless of their place of death.

The health departments of California, Connecticut and Georgia all make clear in their reporting that their disclosures of long-term care residents who died of coronavirus includes those who died in hospitals. Connecticut’s reporting of nursing home deaths, for example, specifically “includes residents currently in-house, in the hospital, or who are deceased.”

The NYSDOH did not respond to the DCNF when asked if it disputes that the state is omitting at least 479 adult care facility residents that died from coronavirus at a hospital in its reporting on long-term care deaths.

Can you imagine the media hysteria if President Trump were behind a similar decision or policy?

We'd never hear the end of it!

Yet the media continues to give Governor Cuomo glowing reviews of his job performance, even as New York reigns as the COVID-19 epicenter of the entire country.

Critics say that New York severely mismanaged the crisis, especially as other populated regions such as California or Chicago are not seeing similar outbreaks.

It's not a conspiracy theory.

Governor Cuomo has made some questionable decisions in his handling of COVID-19.

Perhaps his biggest stumble was requiring nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients, despite the known risk to elderly populations.

The New York Times reports that one-third of coronavirus deaths are nursing home residents:

At least 28,100 residents and workers have died from the coronavirus at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults in the United States, according to a New York Times database. The virus so far has infected more than 153,000 at some 7,700 facilities.

Nursing home populations are at a high risk of being infected by — and dying from — the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is known to be particularly lethal to older adults with underlying health conditions, and can spread more easily through congregate facilities, where many people live in a confined environment and workers move from room to room.

While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.

[...]

The Times’s numbers are based on official confirmations from states, counties and the facilities themselves. They include residents and, in cases where reporting is available, employees of the facilities. Given the wide variability in the type of information available, the totals shown here almost certainly represent an undercount of the true toll.

Just like virtually every other situation, Trump's decisions and actions will likely be vindicated as more about the virus and its impact are made known.

Trump has made difficult yet visionary decisions to protect American lives and livelihoods.

Though the media has unfairly criticized him, the true failure of Governor Cuomo's "leadership" is being made known.

Fortunately, the Trump administration is working with all governors, including Cuomo, to minimize the fallout from COVID-19 as much as possible.