12 January 2021: Cuomo Administration Hiding NY DOH Report Data

Cuomo administration conceals records behind controversial nursing home study

This article from the Times-Union reports on the status of their Freedom Of Information Law (FOIL) request to obtain the New York state government's public data on the COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents.

After months of furor from mourning families, the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued a report in July absolving itself of blame for thousands of COVID-19-related deaths at nursing homes in New York.

Although Cuomo portrayed the findings as definitive proof, six months later, his administration is refusing to back up the findings by providing copies of the records that were the basis of the report's conclusions. In response to a written request from the Times Union, the administration last week cited exemptions in the state Freedom of Information Law which the Department of Health contends allows the agency to keep the records secret....

On the day the report was issued, the Times Union filed a Freedom of Information Law request for copies of the surveys filled out by nursing homes. But the Cuomo administration refused to provide copies of completed surveys — and also would not turn over blank copies showing the survey questions. A Department of Health spokesman, Gary Holmes, refused to say why the department was refusing to provide blank copies.

The Times-Union explains why the Cuomo administration's failure to back up the findings of its DOH report by releasing the data on which it claims to have based it upon is problematic:

A major assertion in the report is that the peak day of nursing home resident deaths came six days before the peak day for admission of COVID-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes.

That timing demonstrates that the state's controversial admissions' policy "could not have been the driver of nursing home infections or fatalities," the report concluded. The findings assert that if re-admissions of sick or recovering patients to nursing homes had been the driver, the peak deaths would have occurred after before the memo's issuance, not before.

But there's also no publicly available data providing independent verification that the "peak" of admissions occurred on April 14. Similarly, the report's assertion that deaths peaked in nursing homes on April 8 cannot be verified.

It's a fair bet that the data does not support the Cuomo administration's findings absolving itself of responibility for nursing home deaths related to its 25 March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to blindly admit patients who had been treated for coronavirus at New York's hospitals. This hypothesis would explain the Cuomo administration's efforts to continue delaying the release of the data and also their ongoing efforts to 'scrub' the data they will ultimately release to minimize contradictory evidence.