Andrew Cuomo’s Star Falling: Questions arise about NY forcing nursing homes to admit infected patients
State’s nursing-home mandate under fire. NYC’s numbers are a leading factor the the state’s staggering COVID-19 statistics.
As of today, nearly 55,000 Americans are reported to have died because of COVID-19.
It is well known that the elderly and frail are more susceptible to the Wuhan Coronavirus. As a result, almost one of five COVID-19 deaths have occurred among those who live in nursing homes or other long-term care institutions.
A survey by the Wall Street Journal published Wednesday found at least 10,700 fatalities among 35 states that either submit data online or responded to information requests.
Some states, including Ohio and Washington, have not reported data in such COVID-19 deaths, while others, like Massachusetts and West Virginia, are working to ramp up testing for residents and staffers at long-term facilities, the newspaper reports.
The virus has infected residents and employees in at least 4,800 facilities, leading to more than 56,000 infections nationwide.
New York state is the epicenter of the American outbreak, accounting for 40% of the deaths. The grim statistic stems from the fact New York City has recorded over 155,000 cases (16% of the national total) and over 11,000 deaths (22% of American deaths).
One factor for the NYC numbers is that the NYC subway system is a moving petri dish.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo provided frightening new details about the durability of the coronavirus — telling New Yorkers that the virus can linger in the air for up to three hours and survive for three days on plastic and steel surfaces commonly found on trains and buses.
The startling new information may explain how the disease spread so far and wide across the five boroughs and why the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s workforce has been hit so hard by the pandemic.
“We’ve been working on how to come up with new cleaning and disinfecting protocols,” Cuomo said, who described the findings as a “shocker to me.”
Another factor is the New York state mandate that nursing homes must readmit residents sent to hospitals with the coronavirus and accept new patients as long as they are deemed “medically stable.” This order apparently stems from the politically correct motivation of “fairness,” a ludicrous approach to preventing the spread of disease.
The clientele at these establishments now have additional stress and worry about coronavirus exposures.
Neal Nibur has lived in a nursing home for about a year, ever since he had a bad bout of pneumonia. Now, the 80-year-old man has not only his own health to worry about but that of his neighbors at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., residence. Four new patients recently arrived from the hospital with Covid-19.
They were admitted for one reason, according to staff members: A state guideline says nursing homes cannot refuse to take patients from hospitals solely because they have the coronavirus.
“I don’t like them playing Russian roulette with my life,” said Mr. Nibur, who is on oxygen. “It’s putting us at risk. I am 80 years old with underlying problems. Everybody here has an underlying problem.”
The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is sounding the alarm about the mandate as well.
Transferring COVID patients from hospitals to nursing homes threatens to make the problem worse. In addition to housing the most vulnerable Americans, many nursing homes already have poor infection control records. Personal protective equipment is hard to come by, and testing kits are often scarce.
Furthermore, it turns out that one overwhelmed NYC facility begged to send its ill patients to the USS Comfort, which was then in port.
New York health officials were warned in writing that a Brooklyn nursing home where 55 patients have died of coronavirus was overwhelmed — weeks before it began topping the state’s official list of resident COVID-19 deaths, damning emails show.
Cobble Hill Health Center CEO Donny Tuchman sent a desperate email to state Health Department officials on April 9, asking if there was “a way for us to send our suspected covid patients” to the hospital built inside the Javits Convention Center or the US Naval hospital ship Comfort — the under-utilized federal medical facilities on Manhattan’s West Side.
“We don’t have the ability to cohort right now based on staffing and we really want to protect our other patients,” Tuchman wrote in a chain of the emails reviewed by The Post.
“I was told those facilities were only for hospitals” to send their overflow patients, Tuchman said.
When the pandemic has ended, and states fully reopen, there will be many valuable lessons that will come from New York State. Unfortunately, it seems, many of them will be on what not to do.
Furthermore, forcing the rest of the country to remain quarantined based on how the disease is behaving in New York is clearly unwise.
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Just a couple of minutes ago I read a post from an old friend from NY. Her 99 y/o father just passed away from Covid. Then I came over and saw this post. This line struck me. “It is well known that the elderly and frail are more susceptible to the Wuhan Coronavirus”. While this is true, it is also true that they are also susceptible to just about any respiratory virus. If Lenny got this years flu instead of Wu Flu would he have survived? He was 99. It will be interesting to see if there is any significant change in year over year death rates in the upper age groups after this pandemic passes. I posit that there won’t be much difference.
A scientist at Oxford University said that he believes that about 2/3 of all COVID19 deaths will be of those so morbidly ill that they would’ve been unlikely to have lived past the end of this year.
Well, going by the ones I know of personally, I think that’s a bit off. Yes, most (but not all) of them were old, and therefore not in the greatest of health, but in the ordinary course of events I would not have expected so many of them to have gone within a year. Some, yes, and some more next year, and some the year after; that’s how it goes at that age. But not so many, in such a short time. And I knew several who were not old at all; 46, 56, mid-60s.
I would consider a long term care or nursing to be part of the health care system regardless if it is public or private. They should have taken are of those patients.
I live in OK and 20% of the cases have been in LTC facilities (patients & staff). 39% of the deaths have been related to LTC facilities. Heck, about 95% of the deaths have been in ages 50+ and 80% over the age of 65. The national guard has a special team going around the LTC facilities to do special cleansing.
https://oklahoman.com/article/5660906/coronavirus-in-oklahoma-oklahoma-national-guard-team-set-up-to-assist-state-nursing-homes
Based on Cuomo’s crying about his various issues, not to admit people to the Javits Center or the Comfort Ship is a crime. He should be subject to law suits about the lack of quality of care.
I’ve been cruising around this weekend in OKC – there are some parking lots which have cars, but I am not sure what is happening inside those places. A friend went to Academy Sports and had to wait outside for a while since they were limiting people going into the store. The news talk about OK opening up to certain types of stores, but they do not mention the restrictions of testing, density, reservations, and so on. We still can’t not walk into any place to get something without proper safeguards.
And there are 8 counties in OK that never had a case of C19 and about 25 additional that were under 5 cases. So, that’s 33 counties out of 77 or 43% which have low case load. So, the governor opened up the state to increased activity, with guidelines. OK and Tulsa Counties have their own limitations which have priority. So what is the big deal – we are watching out for ourselves.
On another front – this weekend would have been the Memorial Marathon for the OKC Memorial. The actual marathon has been postponed to the fall. But, the Lake Hefner Trails has been active over the last few days and some people are running or biking the route – well spaced – but still honoring those who died on April 19th 1995.
I was thinking they’d go out of their way to utilize USS Comfort to the maximum.
The Comfort was not for Wuhan Disease patients. It was for Wuhan-negative patients whom the hospitals couldn’t accommodate because they were busy with the Wuhan patients. There turned out not to be so many of those.
The Javits Center was for those who had recovered from Wuhan Disease but still needed hospital care. But mostly those who recovered were sent home.
Initially, the Comfort was a 1,000 bed ship for the non-covid 19 patients. There was a request for the ship to take Covid patients and the ship was changed to a 500 bed capacity.
Since the ship is for combat care – a lot of the beds were bunk style. I think they had to take those top bunks out to be able to deal with the infectious nature of the illness.
@Milhouse – The purity police continually rate you down for no good reason.
It’s exactly what Ragspierre used to do to every single commenter on his enemies list.
Milhouse is not, I would venture to guess, worried about downvotes. Honestly, no one should be. They are interesting for about a minute, and then, if you look at older posts, they aren’t even visible.
I post here often and say all sort of stupid things, yet you choose this one post to burr my saddle?
Good bloody gawd.
Heh, I always love your comments, Tiki, and wasn’t trying to burr your saddle (I love that phrase, though!). Honestly, I was just here trying to help people with our live event and saw your comment. You rock, and I think Milhouse rocks. I just wanted to note that the concern about up and down votes is fleeting, they don’t appear at all on older posts. No biggie, and my comment was definitely not personal; I am truly sorry if it seemed that way.
“The purity police continually rate you down for no good reason.”
Well, other than he/she is just flat out wrong.
Perhaps when someone makes a statement that is 100% incorrect they get downvoted. You’ll notice that he/she gets upvotes when warranted.
Wrong. I get upvoted when I write something that makes you and your cult of deranged Trumpists happy, and I get downvoted when I write any truth that makes you unhappy. And that is because you have no concept of truth; you judge every statement by whether it advances your cause or not, and you couldn’t care less whether it’s true. You live in a 1984 world where the only definition of truth is whatever helps the Party.
Even when I write about my own personal direct knowledge you downvote it. Even when I write things that every person on the planet knows you downvote it. But if it helps your golden calf then you like it. Feh.
I think there are two Milhouse’s:
one is highly rational providing excellent commentary
and the other is easily angered and retorts with ad hominems.
When I am attacked in person — always by the same small group of utterly dishonest parasites — I reply in kind, pointing out their lack of integrity. What else am I supposed to do? So long as the moderators of this site choose to allow such venom to be posted here at will, I have to defend myself. By descending to personal attacks they have forfeited any right to immunity. They are scum, and must be treated as scum.
Milhouse is correct when he states that the Comfort was NOT to be a COVID facility; it became one when someone “accidentally” sent a COVID patient to the ship and then it was too late to do anything about it–the sterile facility had been breached.
I’m sure the Gov was aghast at the error (nothing like cost-shifting a case or possibly hundreds to the Feds, after all).
When the true history of this fiasco is written, we in NY were nothing more than a petri dish for a third rate governor who has visions of the White House.
Come visit us at our grand re-opening, sometime in 2022. [sarcasm intended]
“Conservatives not welcome in New York.”
https://briansdailyexposure.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/governor-cuomo-conservatives-not-welcome-in-new-york/
“America was never that great.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/18/new-york-governor-andrew-cuomo-america-never-that-great
When did his a-hole’s star ‘rise’?
When he started having Chinese Virus press conferences, and could complete an entire sentence, unlike Joe Biden.
Cuomo’s star turned out to be nothing but his end.
If I recall correctly, the Health Commissioner is the same person that wrote the 2015 NY state guidelines, that since they wouldn’t have ventilators if something like this happened, they would ration them, then set forth how they would decide who lived and died.
So, the man that headed the group writing those guidelines, told the nursing homes they had to take these sick patients into a nursing home.
This is criminal. Nothing can excuse not using the facilities which the federal government sent to aid in the epidemic, which would have been a superb manner of preventing premature deaths in these nursing homes.
Sick people – they seem to get pleasure from premature deaths, just like Rahm Emmanual’s brother…..
Sick people, the lot of them.
The resources the federal government sent were not for patients with Wuhan Disease. They were to relieve the pressure on the hospitals by taking off their hands patients who didn’t have it, or who had recovered from it.
Milhouse, try to keep up.
The feds agreed to take covid patients in those facilities, because NY requested it.
Watch an entire press briefing, not just the highlights.
Actually, originally, the Javits Center was supposed to handle the overflow from facilities after the field hospital in Central Park was filled and the Comfort was to handle the overflow from the hospitals’ non-COVID populations and free those beds up. Remember this was in the days where we needed 30,000 ventilators (or more) that the Feds were “refusing” to send to Fredo’s brother; thanks to the city folks heading out to their second homes out east, I live in a hot spot that would qualify as the third highest hot spot in the country if it weren’t a county in NY (I live in Suffolk County–Nassau has more than we do).
I think we’ll be allowed to reopen Suffolk sometime in 2022.[sarcasm intended}
… As Governor Dreamy basks in hero worship while presiding over the worst per-capita COVID death rate on Earth. If the Governor is so dreamy, why is the situation he governs such a disaster?
(Yes, there’s a virus, but the virus is everywhere on Earth. Only Governor Dreamy has facilitated so many deaths.)
The Virus is Cuomo
To paraphrase
THE MEDIA IS THE VIRUS.
“The request was refused.”
I read the linked article and am still confused as to who it was that refused the request. At first glance, one gets the impression that it was the USS Comfort or some federal official associated with it. But unless I missed it, there’s nothing in the article that confirms this. In fact, it seems just as likely (if not more) that it was some NYC bureaucrat stubbornly enforcing the “rules”.
Does anyone here know the facts about this?
So how is it the guy who helped cause and is overseeing the worst disaster of the Wuhan virus in the country is viewed as an amazing hero….
It’s so bizarre, but the left likes people who put on shows and produce no results. As we have seen with Trump, they focus on the show, the surface, the ephemera. We’re talking about a group who wants to destroy and rebuild our capitalist economy as a communist one, about people who think it’s okay to eliminate millions of people to move toward their Utopian fantasy, and about people who put politics above people. So, yeah, smooth-talking wins over substance with these people, and there’s good reason. They’ve been “fighting” racism and poverty for 60 or 70 years, and things got progressively (pun intended) worse for minorities and the impoverished . . . at least they were until President Trump.
Also, factor in that Democrats are desperate. What do they have? A senile, hair-sniffing loon who gets far too close to children and is skeevy (would you leave your female children or wife alone with this person?). That’s bad. Also bad, though, is Biden’s intense and decades-long incompetence. Has he ever been right about anything regarding his “strength,” foreign policy? Then they have a full-blown commie running as an Indie who’s allowed he’s a socialist. He’s “next” in line, right? And who will swoop in? Hillary? No way she wins. Michelle? No way she even wants to (though I guess she might if someone convinced her she could be proud of her country for a second time in her life). So who?
I can’t think of any Democrat politician with the kind of nationwide name recognition and popularity that would be required. So maybe they’ll go to one of their Hollywood pals?
Haha, Oprah again? LOL, can you imagine. 😛
EVERYBODY GETS A VIRUS!!!!!!!!!!
They’re touting Bill Gates (Georg Soros)
New York is the “epicenter” partly because of mis-represented numbers about the virus. Everyone that has died for any reason, if they test positive for corona virus when autopsied, the cause of death is claimed to be corona virus. Another reason it is so rampant is because the population density in some areas is 66,000 people per square mile. No other place in the country has so many people packed into such a small area. Another reason is the mobile petri dish, the subway system that can and does transport any number of diseases as far and wide as the system travels.
That isn’t true. What they’re doing is counting the many people who die at home with symptoms that look like the Wuhan Disease, but who were never tested. There’s been an enormous increase in such deaths. There’s been no point in testing corpses, and most of them are taken straight to the funeral homes. Certainly no autopsies, especially for the Jewish ones, whose families will not consent, and there’s not nearly enough compelling government interest to justify a court order that will be vigorously opposed. Originally they were not counted, which means there was a massive undercount. By counting them the numbers are more nearly accurate.
Yea, no. The federal government pays a LOT more for a china virus death than a run of the mill pneumonia or other common deaths.
You get what you pay for. If the feds were paying more for listing the cause of death as drowning they would all be drowning deaths.
Again, what you write is just not true. You cannot derive facts from incentives. Maybe it would pay to overstate the death toll; that does NOT mean it’s happening, except in your fundamentally dishonest mind. Because you’re a crook, and you worship a crook, so you assume everyone else must be too.
The fact is that NY’s death toll was being drastically undercounted, because nobody who died without being admitted to hospital was being counted. That had to be corrected. The fact is we’ve had an unprecedented number of deaths in the last two months, and the excess over the normal death rate must be due to the Wuhan disease; what else could it be? So when someone experiences Wuhan-like symptoms and then dies, it would be dishonest not to count them.
I wonder if part of his charm to Dems and their allies in the MSM is that by NY standards — which are the ones they’re most familiar with — he’s a moderate, who gets along well with Republicans and often works with them against the left wing of his own party. Therefore, they imagine, he must be able to appeal to the vast middle, to the uncommitted voters. And if they spin him that way, because that’s really how they see him, then low-information voters will buy it and they’ll be right. I mean that’s how they successfully spun 0bama, fercryinoutloud.
He gets along with downstate NY Republicans, known in the rest of the country as Democrats.
Wrong. For years he got along with the Senate Republicans, and even helped them keep their majority by organizing a group of rebel Democrats to support them.
Been reading a lot today. turns out those ventilators Cuomo was screaming for may very well be killing patients. Oh the irony.
Nursing homes in NY had a direct order if the hospital called for a placement for an released patient, the NH had to accept the placement. The seniors were released if they had no fever yet were never tested before sending them on their way. When it was confirmed, the status of the nursing home was not a consideration. The problem is an acknowledge fact in health care in NY. Of the 600 nursing homes in NY, there’s is minimum over sight by the state. 500 are privately owned and in large by LLC’s located in the greater Long Island area. They use their other LLC’s to be their exclusive vendors. Audits are annual by appointment and are scheduled well in advance of an inspection allowing for equipment to be moved between facilities, staffing scheduled and lipstick maintenance attended to.
New York’s nursing homes are ranked at the bottom with 5 other states which together comprise 40% of all resident homes; North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.
The Kaiser Family Foundation’s ranking criteria for rating cites several culprits for poor care: not enough staff and weak state and federal staffing rules; low pay for workers, resulting in high turnover; feeble financial penalties; and reluctance by state officials to close problem homes for fear of displacing residents.
The Kaiser Family Foundation paper pinpoints the issue in NY as well the other sub standard state. The N.H’s on lower rungs make their profits off from Medicaid, but they put profits over staffing.The debate over profits is complicated because it’s difficult to track profits and revenue, since the majority of nursing homes are owned by private corporations or limited partnerships with complex ownership structure. “There’s plenty of profit being made by these facilities, but they’re shoveling it out through management contracts to themselves, and not into the facility staffing and infrastructure.” said Charles Brown, a partner in the law firm Brown, Wharton & Brothers,
No doubt this will be regarded as heresy, I would suggest that for many of the nursing home fatalities death was a blessing for them and their families. I can remember vividly my mother’s time in anusing home–completely mentally out of it and fed by a tube. So far only a handful of states have granted people that remain mentally competent but wish to avoid the trauma and expense of a nursing the opportunity for a planned health. Nothing more illustrates this country’s hypocrisy i that abortion is constitutionally guaranteed but suicide in most sates is illegal. I believe that the most important of human rights is the right to end a life that is no longer meaningful.
Anybody thinking what I’m thinking . . . ?
It’s probably not true, but I can’t help wondering whether those public-sector-pensioner-techno-bureaucratic rulemakers at NY’s Department of Health — ya know, those who authored the now-controversial 25 March regulation requiring nursing homes in NY to accept patients recently discharged from acute hospital care, whether or not they have tested positive for, or are even suspected of harboring Coronavirus-2, symptomatic or asymptomatic — designed and implemented the rule with their own pecuniary-political interests in mind. (I guess there was an underlying statutory authority, generally speaking.)
I mention this because the outcome of such an irrational-insane regulation, at least from the public-health perspective, seems to comport nicely in theory with what Dr Ezekiel Emanuel of Obamacare notoriety (author and advocate of what others disapprovingly nicknamed the Act’s Death Panel component) advocated: Let the old and very sick die away comfortably, humanely, and without too much fanfare. That’s life; it ends, runs the ghoulish doctrine.
On this nightmarish view, the NY regulators would add, “sooner, and cheaper, rather than later, and costlier”. You see, too, the unspent funds that would have gone for the eldercare in the nursing homes can now be seen as more properly applied to the higher priority of the pensioners’ financial and job security. More incest between public sector union members and the politicians meeting in Albany and others convening in NY municipalities.
By letting the uselessly old and very sick die off (read maybe: negligently killed by fiat?), in this case state or municipal funds needn’t be “wasted” and can instead be “saved” in order to shore up the techno-bureaucratic rulemakers’ pension treasure.
What a fortuitous coincidence! Anyway, again, it’s probably just too good to be true for the public-sector pensioners, and so unlikely that the regulation came about by design. But, on the other hand, the timing of the department’s rule’s issue-date in relation to the current federal COVID-19 disbursements — within a month — is considerable, no?
Or, is our grand society really, already this dystopic? It will be if Congress, instead of amending current federal bankruptcy statutes and allowing for states to declare bankruptcy to reorganize their fiscal house, grants any blue state in question its demanded financial bailout.
The scam against honest, hardworking American citizens and taxpayers must end. I support Sen McConnell’s position. No financial bailout for the these states. Change the federal law for affected states to do what’s fair and right for all.
To Governor Cuomo et al: The jig is up. Face that and decide to grow up your states, along with your party. It’s a real choice, and it’s yours, not ours to make. We, The People, just find the facts. You foreordained your own sentence decades back. It’s time to repent and start over, but this time far more honestly, and realistically. If that costs you your jobs, oh well — that’s life. No mortal’s (or his party’s) illicit power lasts forever.
Uh, let me correct you here.
It’s not “Furthermore, forcing the rest of the country to remain quarantined based on how the disease is behaving in New York is clearly unwise.”
It’s “Furthermore, forcing the rest of the country to remain quarantined based upon how moronic, idiot Democrat Politicians are functioning in New York is clearly unwise.”
See “New York Health Commissioners encouraging New Yorkers to congregate in large groups, ride subways, and send Covid19 virus carriers to nursing homes”. . . . .
Well, Proconsul Cuomo-the-Younger has said that we don’t need those kind of people in NY State.
Having failed to drive enough of them out fast enough, then thinking better of flat-out killing them by taking medical gear, he found a deniable policy to do the job. Takes out some inconvenient worngthinkers by demographic, and knocks down state medical costs by death paneling a few of the right, wrong folks. It’s a 2-fer.
(*) Upstate folks tend to be armed, despite Gov Soprano’s best efforts.
Proconsul Cuomo-the-Younger’s model of his domain:
— His *constituents* are down state.
— His *subjects* are up state.
— His job is to wrangle the latter, for the smug satisfaction of the former.
And the Screaming-D’s want this guy to be president. Becasue … well, it’s obvious.
Note to the Hereditary Proconsul: When you make Alex Jones look not crazy, you might have gone too far.
— Mobilize the army.
— To operate internally in US.
— Against citizens.
— To seize gear n machinery (from people who need it.)
— From one bunch of people to be used by another.
— Photo accmpanying the widest seen slobbering press-release-article shows tooled up guy in black running toward *an actual black helicoptor.* (Does this guy not have a media shop? Soembody does powerpoints for his daily “half the facts” briefings. Maybe make looking at the visuals somebody’s job, too?)
When the biggest knock against you is that you’re a thug running a protection operation disguised as a state, maybe don’t flex about taking stuff from one bunch who tend not to vote for you; to give to others do.
Just pretend you’re trying to hide it a little. Please?
I wonder what she’s doing tonight.
Boyce and Hart, slip and fall.
Barr orders legal action against governors whose COVID-19 actions infringe on civil rights – https://go.shr.lc/2KAn9qu – @washtimes