New York state officials issued a report this week that found the high number of Covid19 deaths in the state’s nursing homes was due to “infected staff” and not the disastrous policies that state government put into place.
The report by the NY Department of Health found “an analysis of the timing between known nursing home staff infections and nursing home fatalities indicates that they are correlated” and that “the peak number of nursing home staff reporting COVID-19 symptoms occurred 23 days prior to the date of the peak nursing home fatalities.”
Early on in the outbreak NY Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order barring older patients from being refused entry into nursing homes based on suspected Covid19 statuses.
“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of Covid-19,” the order stated. NY state also made it illegal for nursing homes to test any resident returning from a hospital for Covid19.
Hospital administrators, not doctors or nursing home staff, were given authority to deem patients fit for transfer to nursing homes and to decide which patients would be transferred.
The results were devastating. There are about 30,000 overall deaths in NY state due to Covid19. About 20% of them have been estimated to have taken place in nursing homes.
The numbers are bad enough, but nursing home staff say they are also being suppressed, and that NY state government is covering the real numbers up to prevent the real extent of the damaging effects of the policy from being known.
The architect of the policy is New York State’s Health Commissioner Howard Zucker. Zucker was once the highest-ranking American in the WHO, an organization President Trump today withdrew the U.S. from.