#Cuomo report on nursing-home deaths related to COVID-19 ripped by experts

Scientists and medical experts are blasting an internal New York state study that let Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration off the hook for ordering nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients.

“They really need to own the fact that they made a mistake, that it was never right to send COVID patients into nursing homes and that people died because of it,” Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine, told The Associated Press.

Catherine Troisi, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas, Houston, said the Department of Health report was riddled with holes, including a lack of data on nursing homes that were free of the deadly disease before being forced to admit infected patients.

“Would this get published in an academic journal? No,” Troisi told The AP.

Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the City University of New York School of Public Health, also noted that the state’s official nursing home death toll doesn’t include residents who died at hospitals.

Nash called that a “potentially huge problem” which reduced the total number of fatalities and could “introduce bias into the analysis.”

Charlene Harrington, a professor emerita of nursing and sociology at the University of California at San Francisco, said of the report, “It seems like the Department of Health is trying to justify what was an untenable policy.”

A similar sentiment was voiced by Rupak Shivakoti, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, who said, “I think they got a lot of political pushback and so their response was, ‘This isn’t a problem. Don’t worry about it.’”

In the report released July 6, the DOH blamed infected staffers and visitors for inadvertently spreading the virus in nursing homes, while absolving itself of any blame over its since-abandoned, March 25 directive.

Shivakoti told AP that even if workers who didn’t know they were sick behind some outbreaks, that doesn’t mean the coronavirus patients patients didn’t play a major role.

“If they didn’t infect other patients directly, they still could have infected a worker,” Shivakoti said.

Dr. Mark Dworkin, a former Illinois state epidemiologist, also said the finding that people don’t transmit the virus after nine days of illness was based on the population at large.

It’s not clear if that’s also true for nursing home residents who may have weaker immune systems and shed the virus longer, he said.

New York Department of Health spokesman Gary Holmes said the study was intended to “measure the strength of the variables…The strongest factor in driving the nursing home infections was through staff infections.”

Meanwhile, the state Legislature plans to hold a pair of joint hearings next month on the “rate of infection and mortality” in residential health care facilities for the elderly and infirm.


Congressional Republicans have also demanded that Cuomo turn over records on the March 25 order and its effects.

“Blame-shifting, name-calling and half-baked data manipulations will not make the facts or the questions they raise go away,” U.S Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana), minority leader of a House subcommittee on the COVID crisis, wrote in a letter to Cuomo last week.

Asked to respond, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said: “We’re used to Republicans denying science but now they are screeching about time, space and dates on a calendar to distract from the federal government’s many, many, embarrassing failures. No one is buying it.”