The nomination of Dr. Rachel Levine for assistant secretary for Health and Human Services is under renewed fire from Republicans, who are asking why data on COVID-19 cases and deaths in nursing homes is missing from weekly reports issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Health while Levine was secretary of the agency.
The reports have been missing the data for at least 100 nursing homes since the department began issuing the reports last May. In at least one case, the missing data obscured a deadly coronavirus outbreak.
Levine has also been criticized for her March 2020 decision as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health to require nursing homes to admit patients discharged from the hospital even if they had been hospitalized for COVID-19.
Levine’s nomination advanced out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Wednesday by a vote of 13-9. If confirmed by the full Senate, Levine would be the first openly transgender woman to hold a high position in a presidential administration.
But on Tuesday, four Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee sent Levine a letter requesting more information on the missing data. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, also raised the issue with Levine during a HELP Committee hearing in February. At the time, Levine blamed delays in Pennsylvania’s data reporting system for the missing data.
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The Republican letter disputed that, saying, “The data problems date back many months and it has been approximately one year since the beginning of the pandemic.”
The most recent report from the Pennsylvania Department of Health shows missing data on COVID-19 cases and deaths for 138 nursing homes.
The Republican letter also cited reporting from Spotlight PA challenging the data lag explanation.
One article found that nursing homes “said that they were in fact meeting reporting requirements but could not explain why their data was not included in the state’s weekly reports. Others were frustrated that they reported their data correctly, but it still showed up with errors in the public-facing reports.”
In the case of Cedarbrook Senior Care and Rehabilitation nursing home in Allentown, the missing data obscured a deadly outbreak. When data for Cedarbrook finally appeared in an August report, it revealed 80 COVID-19 deaths, the second-highest among Pennsylvania’s 693 nursing homes. According to Spotlight PA, an administrator at Cedarbrook said the facility had been regularly reporting its data to the state.
Levine’s problems bear a resemblance to those of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Indeed, the Republican letter said, “Pennsylvania had a similar policy to New York state early on during the pandemic that required nursing homes to admit or readmit infected patients regardless of whether those facilities were prepared to sequester infected patients.”
Cuomo has been accused of omitting data to hide the full extent of COVID-19-related nursing home deaths in New York.
Thus far, no one has accused Levine of a cover-up, and no investigation has linked Levine’s decision to require nursing homes to admit COVID-10 positive residents to nursing home deaths in Pennsylvania. In June, she defended her actions by saying that nursing home residents “contracted the virus in the facility. So it doesn’t mean they were bringing it to the facility. The virus was already there.”
Over half of the 24,000 COVID-19-related deaths in Pennsylvania have occurred among nursing home staff and residents.
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Levine has also received criticism for removing her mother from a personal care facility last May when a coronavirus outbreak occurred there while simultaneously forcing nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients released from the hospital. Levine says that her mother requested the move.
