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After Governor Andrew Cuomo’s order, New York nursing homes were forced to accept more than 4,500 coronavirus patients from hospitals, according to the Daily Caller
New York Governor Cuomo has faced heavy backlash for his March 25 order which forced recovering coronavirus patients into New York nursing homes.
The order was in place for six weeks until Cuomo reversed it on May 10.
Cuomo ultimately blamed the decision on the state’s high body count among the elderly.
Now, The New York State Department of Health refuses to release the results of an internal survey on how many coronavirus patients were placed in nursing homes across the state.
A department spokesperson admitted that the health department is knowingly under-counting the number of nursing home deaths as a result of a quiet rule change made in late April.
Between April 28 and May 3, the state of New York changed the rules for counting nursing homes deaths amid the additional recovering coronavirus patients.
According to the Daily Caller, “Put differently: A nursing home resident, who became sick at their nursing home and then died shortly after arriving at a hospital, is omitted from New York’s tally of nursing home deaths.”
More from Daily Caller:
Until at least April 28, the health department was disclosing coronavirus deaths of all nursing home and adult care facility residents, regardless of whether the patient died at their long-term care facility or at a hospital.
By May 3, the state had made a subtle change to its disclosures, web archives show. The health department now only discloses coronavirus deaths of long-term care patients who died while physically present at their facility.
The end result is a sharp reduction in the official number of deaths at many such facilities. New York is the only state with a major coronavirus outbreak in nursing homes to report those fatalities that way.
