Half of all WNY Covid deaths were nursing home residents, new state data shows

Feb. 6—The true extent of the death toll the Covid-19 pandemic caused in New York's nursing homes became clearer Saturday.

The state Health Department had said 630 residents either were confirmed or presumed to have died of the virus inside nursing homes in Erie County.

It turns out that the number of Erie County nursing home residents who have lost their lives to the virus so far is 849.

The additional 219 died in hospitals or other facilities. That's an increase of nearly 35% over the only figure the state had acknowledged up until now.

Saturday, three days after losing a Freedom of Information lawsuit to a public interest group that had sought a truer picture, the Health Department posted a new version of its online nursing home death chart online.

It included a new column for confirmed Covid deaths of nursing home residents outside their nursing homes.

The Empire Center for Public Policy won a judicial ruling Wednesday that gave the state five business days to release the requested data. The information released Saturday partly fulfills this request, the Empire Center said.

Besides the 219 additional Erie County nursing home deaths, the chart added 24 deaths to the Niagara County total, bringing it to 148.

The state now acknowledges the death of 15 additional nursing home residents from Genesee County, 14 from Orleans County, 12 from Allegany County, nine from Wyoming County, three from Cattaraugus County and one from Chautauqua County.

For the eight-county region, the number of nursing home residents who are known or presumed to have died from Covid went from 977 to 1,274 — a 30% increase.

That means nursing home residents have accounted for nearly 56% of the virus deaths in the eight counties since the pandemic began last March.

Statewide, the new data show the number of nursing home residents killed by the virus is now known to be 13,163, counting 4,067 deaths of residents who were moved to hospitals or other facilities before dying. The statewide total includes 6,139 confirmed virus deaths and 2,957 presumed virus deaths inside nursing homes.

"I'm very thankful to the Empire Center for their work here," said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, which advocates for improved quality of life in nursing homes.

"It's frankly inexplicable to me why they would be concealing this information. I'm not sure who it serves, but it certainly doesn't serve the people who live in nursing homes or who have family members living in nursing homes," Mollot said.

A spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo referred reporters to the statement state Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker made after Attorney General Letitia James' report Jan. 28 on the death toll in nursing homes.

Zucker said the state's total death toll from the pandemic, which was 36,079 as of Saturday, always has counted everyone who died, regardless of where they died.

James' report, based on direct questioning in a small number of nursing homes, estimated that the Health Department's policy of acknowledging only deaths within nursing home walls undercounted the real death toll by as much as 50%.

It turns out that nearly 31% of the nursing home residents who died did so in other facilities.

Zucker said the James report "suggests that all should be counted as nursing home deaths and not hospital deaths even though they died in hospitals. That does not in any way change the total count of deaths but is instead a question of allocating the number of deaths between hospitals and nursing homes. DOH has consistently made clear that our numbers are reported based on the place of death. DOH does not disagree that the number of people transferred from a nursing home to a hospital is an important data point, and is in the midst of auditing this data from nursing homes."

The totals posted Saturday aren't good enough, according to Bill Hammond of the Empire Center.

"The details released Saturday represent a tiny fraction of what the Empire Center requested," Hammond wrote in an email. "The department has now posted facility-level totals for a single day — Feb. 4 — whereas the center requested facility-level numbers for each day of the pandemic. The additional detail is necessary to assess the impact of specific events and policies, such the Health Department's much-debated March 25 guidance memo, which for several weeks compelled nursing homes to admit patients who were coronavirus positive, and which many critics have blamed for contributing to the high death toll among residents."

For the five counties deemed "Western New York" by the health department for Covid-19 planning efforts — Erie, Niagara, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany — 259 people contracted Covid-19 in a nursing home but died at a hospital, the state said Saturday.

When added to the 836 who died in nursing homes, the total number of confirmed Covid-19 fatalities among nursing home residents in the five-county region is now 1,095, plus 16 presumed Covid-19 deaths.

That's more than half the 2,045 residents of Erie, Niagara, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua and Allegany counties killed by the virus since March.

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