New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s advisers allegedly convinced state health officials to alter a July 2020 report on nursing home resident fatalities.
The July 2020 report focused only on residents who died inside long-term care facilities, excluding those who died in a hospital after becoming sick in a nursing home, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people with knowledge on the matter.
Factoring the data this way showed 6,432 nursing home residents had died, as the initial version of the report noted nearly 10,000 elderly assisted living residents had died by July 2020, one person with information on the report said.
The changes to the initial report reveal the state maintained a fuller data set on out-of-facility nursing home deaths as early as the summer of 2020.
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More than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term care locations were confirmed or presumed to have died from COVID-19 since March 2020, factoring those who died in assisted living facilities and those who later died in hospitals, state officials have since reported.
The figure amounts to be 50% higher than earlier official death tolls.
Health Department spokesman Gary Holmes said, “The out of facility deaths were held aside for verification,” in a statement.
“The report’s purpose was to ensure the public had a clear non-political evaluation for how COVID entered nursing homes at the height of the pandemic. All data sets reviewed came to a common conclusion — that spread from staff was likely the primary driver that introduced COVID into these nursing homes,” Holmes said.
Holmes said the report was a chance to gauge whether the state’s March 25 advisory, which stated nursing homes “must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals to nursing homes,” had any bearing on the number of deaths reported in the data.
“The out of facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified — this did not change the conclusion of the report, which was and is that the March 25 order was ‘not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities,'” Beth Garvey, a special counsel and adviser to the governor, said in a statement.
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Cuomo is facing bipartisan calls from state officials to resign amid a separate scandal involving three women alleging him of past sexual misconduct.
