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Death and truth: What to make of new numbers on New York nursing home fatalities

The New York Daily News - 2/10/2021

No thanks to the Cuomo administration’s many months of obfuscation, now we know: Almost 15,000 of New York’s 44,512 COVID fatalities since the pandemic began were among residents of nursing homes and adult-care and assisted-living facilities. The state Health Department finally disclosed those numbers this week after losing a Freedom of Information Law suit. Until recently, , New York reported only deaths of nursing home residents that happened inside nursing home facilities, not those of people who died after transfer to hospitals.

With the new totals included, deaths among nursing home, adult care and assisted living residents now make up about 33% of New York’s confirmed and presumed COVID fatalities to date.

Which means, Gov. Cuomo’s distorted, self-congratulatory claims to the contrary, New York hasn’t done any better or any worse in terms of nursing home deaths than the country at large, where 33% of deaths have come from the nursing home population.

We wonder whether the governor will fix the record in the second edition of his memoir, if there is one. In the first, he wrote: “New York was number 46 out of 50 in the nation when it came to percentage of deaths in nursing homes. There were only four states with a lower percentage of nursing home deaths, and New York had a much worse situation to manage.”

In fact, New York ranks near the middle of the pack among U.S. states in percentage of total deaths among nursing home residents. The new data show an extraordinary additional number of nursing home fatalities took place in the months after New York passed the peak of the first wave last spring.

So now, with the Legislature poised to pass a package of nursing-home-safety bills, the question becomes: Why didn’t the measures facilities were ordered to undertake to ward off new infections, like mandatory testing for patients and staff, restricting visitors and PPE wearing, work? Or were they just not followed closely enough?

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