21 February 2021: Cuomo COVID Nursing Home Death Toll May Be Bigger

NY nursing home resident: State tally of 1 COVID death at my facility is BS

This article calls the New York Department of Health's latest tally of COVID-19 deaths at nursing homes into question:

As COVID-19 ravaged nursing homes, killing thousands of elderly residents, state tallies showed one Long Island home experienced something of a miracle — just a single death.

Even when the Cuomo Administration, under court order, this month released more complete data to include nursing home residents who died in hospitals, the tally for the Grand Rehabilitation and Nursing at South Point rose by just three.

But a resident of the Nassau County home claims that even four deaths is baloney, insisting two or three residents died each day at the height of the pandemic — making for so many victims, the facility's beauty parlor was turned into a makeshift morgue.

"The people just disappeared," said Jeffrey Fischler, 51, who has been at the 185-bed home for two years. He said his roommate died — although he does not know the cause — and the corpse sat in their room for eight hours because there was no place to put the body.

The village of Island Park, where Grand Rehabilitation is located, issued 35 death certificates for those who died at the home from March 1, 2020, through May 31, 2020. That is compared to just three during the same period in 2019, according to records obtained by The Post.

To the extent that such undercounting exists at other New York nursing home and assisted care facilities, the number of COVID-19 nursing home resident deaths may be worse than the Cuomo administration has acknowledged.