26 April 2020: Governor Cuomo Doubles Down

Cuomo doubles down on ordering nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients

this article reveals how Governor Cuomo refuses to allow challenges to the state government's authority in requiring nursing homes to admit coronavirus-infected patients.

The governor — who himself has described nursing homes as a “feeding frenzy’’ for the deadly coronavirus — said that the facilities can’t challenge a state regulation forcing them to admit patients with the contagion.

But he insisted that nursing homes could transfer those ill with the virus to another facility if the centers lacked such things as quarantine space, proper protective equipment and staff.

Asked by a reporter at his daily briefing Sunday if there was anything contradictory about his statements, the governor replied, “No.”

How did that work in practice?

The CEO of a hard-hit Brooklyn nursing home, where 55 patients have died from the coronavirus, told The Post last week that he’d been warning state Health Department officials for weeks he had staffing and equipment issues — yet received little help.

“There is no way for us to prevent the spread under these conditions,’’ the head of the Cobble Hill Health Center, Donny Tuchman, wrote in an e-mail to the department on April 8.

He said he asked to move some patients to the makeshift wards at Manhattan’s Javits Center and aboard the city-docked USNS Comfort amid the pandemic, only to be told those two spots were receiving only patients from hospitals.

“I made specific requests to transfer patients, and it didn’t happen,’’ Tuchman told The Post. “There weren’t options.”

The article also reports that state health officials "conducted a focus study" of the facility and determined it had sufficient resources in their view to justify rejecting the nursing home's CEO's requests to transfer patients, finding they had plenty of masks and gloves. The article doesn't indicate what they thought of the staffing or other issues cited by the facility in their requests.

There's enough information here to indicate New York's top health officials were effectively implementing a triage strategy with the primary objective of reducing what they anticipated would be the peak load of coronavirus patients on hospitals directly at the expense of privately-run nursing homes, as confirmed by the transfers of patients known to be carriers of the coronavirus from hospitals to nursing homes, along with body bags. That the facilities they designated to take on overflow patients from hospitals went almost completely unused confirms they badly misjudged what the peak load would be.