18 October 2020: Why a Nonpartisan Think Tank Sued Team Cuomo for NY Nursing Home Death Data

Churchill: The continuing quest for truth about NY's nursing home deaths

Another Chris Churchill column, which includes a discussion with Bill Hammond, the director of health policy for the Empire Center for Public Policy. The Center filed a lawsuit in the past week seeking public data records New York's health department has collected on COVID-19 illnesses and deaths among patients who resided in New York nursing homes in 2020 and has been refusing to provide to all those filing freedom of information requests for it:

Notably, the lawsuit does not even mention the controversial March 25 state order directing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients. And when I talked with Bill Hammond, the Empire Center's director of health policy, he said too much has been made of the mandate by some critics of the governor. He was being very fair.

Hammond also said he initially didn't think the state's flawed nursing home count mattered all that much. That changed when he saw Cuomo and other officials using the partial count to suggest, in response to criticism of the mandate, that New York had done better at protecting nursing home residents from COVID-19 than other states.

"That drove me up a tree," Hammond told me. "They said it over and over again fully knowing it wasn't true."

Then Hammond watched in dismay as the Department of Health used the undercount in a joke of a report (my words, not Hammond's) that claimed the March 25 order was not a factor in nursing home fatalities. The report was not only bad science, but troubling evidence of the health department being used to shine the governor's star.

According to New York's official count, 6,600 nursing home residents died of COVID-19. Hammond, after analyzing death and nursing home occupancy rates, puts the actual toll at 10,000 and up — equal to at least 10 percent of the state's nursing home population.

"That is a public health catastrophe," Hammond said. "It demands our absolute attention, so we understand how we could have prevented it and what we can do to prevent it next time."

Hammond's estimate of total coronavirus nursing home deaths is consistent with the lower end of the range we've seen in the past several months.