The scourge of COVID-19 nursing home deaths is set to loom large in American politics.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faces the most heat, but the fallout is also a liability for President Trump.
Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are highly susceptible to the coronavirus because residents often have weakened immune systems and close interaction is required between the residents and staff members. Of the 107,478 confirmed coronavirus deaths in the United States, 40,600 have occurred in nursing homes, according to an analysis in USA Today. New York has the highest death count of any state at 6,062, 15% of the total.
Cuomo has come under fire for two policies. In March, his administration prohibited nursing homes from turning away residents who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 and permitted nursing home employees who had tested positive for the coronavirus to continue working as long as they were asymptomatic. Those policies were not rescinded until May.
“The way this has been handled by the state is totally irresponsible, negligent, and stupid,” Elaine Mazzotta told the Associated Press. Mazzotta is a nurse whose mom died at a Long Island nursing home in April, likely from COVID-19. “They knew better. They shouldn’t have sent these people into nursing homes,” she said.
Cuomo has been on the defensive recently, trying to deflect blame for the nursing home crisis in the Empire State.
“Anyone who wants to ask, ‘Why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes?’ — it’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance,” Cuomo said May 20. “So, they should ask President Trump.”
Older voters are the ones most likely to be concerned about the issue of preventing the coronavirus in nursing homes.
“This will affect certain voters, and those voters could be important to both the president and Gov. Cuomo,” said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition. “The people who will be particularly sensitive to this will be older voters, those in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.”
No politician wants to face a lot of angry older voters. According to the Census Bureau, people 65-74 have the highest rates of voter turnout among any age group, and those aged 55-64 are a close second.
Misha Eliasziw, a professor at the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University, told the Washington Examiner she thinks that the issue could be part of the fall campaign, “But it will be rolled into the larger issue of the high number of deaths countrywide. I believe the issue will be, should the federal government have acted sooner to warn the population of the dangers of COVID-19, as well as focusing on travel from Europe that seems to have brought infection to the East Coast?”
Former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden fired a warning shot in May that he plans to make Trump’s handling of the pandemic an election issue in an editorial for the Washington Post. While Biden didn’t mention nursing homes, he did accuse Trump of “deflecting blame and dividing Americans” during the pandemic instead of providing leadership.
Perhaps sensing the political potency of the issue, Trump included an independent commission to examine the nursing home response to the virus as part of his Opening Up America Again plan. In March, the administration banned visitors to nursing homes, and in May issued strict guidelines for the reopening of long-term care facilities.
