20 February 2021: Cuomo's Main Defense in COVID Nursing Home Deaths Crumbles

Government memo crushes Cuomo's defense in COVID nursing home scandal

What did the Cuomo administration know and when did it know it?

Governor Cuomo has frequently claimed that the 25 March 2020 directive forcing New York's nursing homes to blindly admit patients without testing to determine if they were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was based on guidance from the federal government. This report identifies what that guidance actually was and confirms that Governor Cuomo's nursing home policy did not comply with it, demolishing Governor Cuomo's repeated claims in the process.

Gov. Cuomo has repeatedly defended his administration's directive for nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients as the product of federal "guidance" — even though one of those government documents says only that infected seniors "can" be admitted to the facilities.

Here is what the federal document actually said in providing guidance in a "Q&A" section for nursing home care providers:

"When should a nursing home accept a resident who was diagnosed with COVID-19 from a hospital?" it says.

"A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 and still under transmission-based Precautions for COVID-19 as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions. If a nursing home cannot, it must wait until these precautions are discontinued."

Very few nursing home facilities in New York were capable of meeting that standard. They could have worked around those limitations by establishing dedicated nursing homes for patients with COVID-19, but New York's Department of Health did not establish any such facilities until November 2020, some eight months later.

The report also describes how the Cuomo administration's 25 March 2020 directive was immediately challenged by health care providers:

The DOH directive — which cited an "urgent need to expand hospital capacity" — came under immediate fire from three health-care industry groups: AMDA-The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Medicine, the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living. In a March 29 statement, the organizations said they were "deeply concerned" with the underlined portion of the order.

"This is a short-term and short-sighted solution that will only add to the surge in COVID-19 patients that require hospital care," they said.

A former federal Health and Human Services official also told The Post that it was a potential recipe for disaster.

"[Cuomo] made this blanket requirement and some nursing homes may have not been prepared to have these patients and may have caused cross-contamination," the ex-official said.

Much of that is evident from the contemporary reporting on the problems nursing homes were facing in the period the Cuomo administration's 25 March 2020 directive was in effect, from 25 March 2020 through 10 May 2020.