Evidence of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 order mandating that nursing homes accept individuals diagnosed with the coronavirus has been deleted from the New York State Department of Health’s website.
The webpage relating to the order gives a message saying the document is “not found” when you try to access it, but the document can still be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Cuomo has faced increasing scrutiny over the past few weeks for the way the state has protected nursing homes during the coronavirus outbreak, including his order requiring that nursing homes accept coronavirus patients.
It was learned that the state purposely omitted an unknown amount of coronavirus deaths in recent reports in an apparent attempt to hide the actual number.
As a response to the scrutiny, New York changed the way it counts nursing home deaths between April 28 and May 3.
“New York has mismanaged how we have approached and how we’ve protected our seniors in our nursing homes,” Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York said about Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes. “We knew, going into this, that our most vulnerable are our seniors and particularly in those assisted living facilities, whether they’re senior living facilities or nursing homes.”
She continued: “New York, when compared to other states, took a number of negative actions that cost over 5,000 lives. They also didn’t fully tell the public how many seniors’ deaths there were coming from nursing homes. So, that reporting data, they didn’t count the hospital deaths when there was a positive case that was transmitted because of the senior nursing home.”
It was reported this week that nearly half of all coronavirus deaths in the United States were residents in long-term care facilities.
