#Family of NY nursing home residents lost to COVID testify to woe

Relatives of New York nursing home residents Monday blasted the conditions that drove the facilities’ coronavirus hell — including Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s directive barring the refusal of COVID-positive patients.

“The COVID crisis in New York’s nursing homes was a preventable crisis,” Jerry Maldonado testified before a joint hearing of state lawmakers via video-conference.

“It was fueled by poor public policy decisions, like the Department of Health’s March 25 directive.”

That order barred nursing homes from turning away COVID-positive patients, even as Cuomo in press briefings repeatedly likened the bug’s effect on the elderly to fire in dry grass.

“In a cruel twist of fate, while healthy families like mine were locked out of nursing homes and forced to stay away from our loved ones, my mom was locked into a facility with COVID-positive patients released from a hospital,” testified Maldonado, a Newburgh resident whose 81-year-old mother, Maria, was living in a Rockland County home when the pandemic hit.

Maldonado said that his family and others like it were “kept in the dark” about the policy, as he reached out to workers at his mother’s facility, Northern Metropolitan Residential Healthcare Facility, in late March asking whether the coronavirus had reached the home.

“For nearly two weeks, we got no response,” he testified. “It was only after my mom developed her first COVID symptoms that I confronted the director of nursing and he finally admitted to me that, in his words, he had been forced to admit COVID patients into the facility by the state, and that he could not guarantee that my mom had not been exposed to COVID.”

Cuomo has defended — and continues to defend — the policy by saying that nursing homes always had not just a right, but a responsibility to turn away patients they couldn’t care for.

But the state “did not proactively verify that nursing homes had the ability to safely care for COVID patients before releasing them into these facilities, knowing full well that many of them are understaffed and overcrowded, even on their best day,” Maldonado said.

On April 11, Maldonado’s mother died from complications related to the coronavirus, Maldonado said, becoming one of the more than 6,400 nursing home residents statewide lost in confirmed or presumed cases of the bug.

Virginia Wilson-Butler testified that her aunt, Eva Johnson, received years of substandard care in Bushwick, Brooklyn’s Buena Vida Continuing Care and Rehabilitation Center — a level that hardly improved once the coronavirus hit.

“Finally, from March 2020 to May 4, 2020 — the day she died — Miss Johnson lost 15 pounds, received oxygen on April 21, and an IV fluid with antibiotics,” Wilson-Butler told the panel. “She was diagnosed presumed COVID.”

“X-rays showed pneumonia,” Wilson-Butler continued. “She never had a fever, she never had a cough. In that timeframe, they stated at first, everything with her was normal: Her weight, her eating, her therapy … her bedsore.

“Until all of a sudden, she’s not eating the bedsore got bigger, it doesn’t look good.”

Throughout the ordeal, Wilson-Butler testified that she had great difficulty getting up-to-date information from her aunt’s caretakers.

Wilson-Butler said she was speaking up that another’s loved one won’t have to suffer through the same hardship.

“I can’t help my aunt anymore — rest in peace — but I can help someone else,” she said.

Testifying from her home in California, Mikko Cook recounted the horror of her family being out of touch with her father — a resident of Albany’s Hudson Park Rehabilitation and Nursing Center — as the virus raged.

“Frequent visits to see him … helped my family see whether or not he was eating well, getting decent sleep and still smiling,” she said. “More importantly, it gave dad time in a world quickly disappearing to him, surrounded by people he loved, holding his hand and making him laugh. For dad, in those fleeting moments, he was safe and his life made sense.

“And then, one day, we just never returned.”

Since, Cook’s father, Ron, was injured in an alleged assault by another resident, Cook said, with her family only able to be connected to a video call with him after five days of calls to facility management.

“We need to see dad, and not through a glass with a telephone,” Cook said. “My father has not breathed fresh air or felt the sun on his face since March 9.”

A spokesman for Northern Metropolitan said that the facility diligently adhered to state and federal health guidelines throughout the pandemic, and made sure residents and their families could stay in touch.

“Northern Metropolitan never kept the residents or staff in the dark with this pandemic,” said Jeff Jacomowitz in a statement in part, noting that the facility gave family members regular updates via phone, letters and email.

“We would also like to express our condolences to the Maldonado family for the loss of Maria,” the statement continued. “Every resident becomes part of our family and when something like this occurs, the staff is deeply affected.”

Spokespeople for Buena Vida and Hudson Park could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon.