#Cuomo admin tracked nursing home deaths months before DOH report

The Cuomo administration began tracking COVID-19 related out-of-facility nursing home residents deaths as early as last April — yet still withheld the data from a state Health Department report released nearly three months later, according to a document obtained by The Post.

The state DOH memo sent out to the administrators of nursing homes and adult care facilities directed them to report daily the number of residents who died of COVID-19, including “if the death occurred in” their “facility or the hospital setting.”

A copy of the directive obtained by The Post is dated April 18, 2020 — about eleven weeks before a health department report that excluded the number of nursing home residents who died of coronavirus outside of their facilities.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aides pushed the DOH to omit the out-of-facility nursing resident deaths.

The final report, consequently, only included in-facility deaths, painting an incomplete picture of the pandemic’s effect on the state’s most vulnerable population.

Only after the Journal report did Cuomo’s team admit to withholding data in the public report.

“The out-of-facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified,” Beth Garvey, special counsel to Cuomo, had said in a statement.

At the end of January, the state finally released an accounting of the number of nursing home resident deaths in both nursing homes and hospitals.

But, the revised figures came after months of stonewalling lawmakers and reporters, a lawsuit from the Empire Center and a damning state attorney general report.

A spokesperson for Cuomo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.