As New York’s group home workers increasingly balked at last-minute assignments at COVID-19-infected facilities with lax health standards, a senior manager ordered staff to “work now and grieve later” or face punishment, an internal email obtained by the Washington Examiner shows.

Similar to its nursing homes, New York had a policy of co-mingling healthy and infected residents in its developmentally disabled group home system, resulting in the deaths of 36 workers and infections of 11,639 as of May 5. Numerous employees told the Washington Examiner that they lived with babies or elderly people and were terrified of working in such conditions.