25 February 2021: Team Cuomo's Problems in Counting COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Gov. Cuomo says N.Y. couldn't report nursing home deaths in hospitals. But other states did.

This report describes how different New York's policy for fully counting nursing home resident deaths from COVID-19 was from every other state in the U.S.:

When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was first accused of undercounting nursing home deaths from Covid-19, his administration offered a simple explanation:

The state did not include nursing home residents who died in the hospital in the publicly posted tally of coronavirus deaths linked to long-term care facilities, officials said, because it wanted to avoid a "double count" of those deaths in the statewide total.

But New York stands apart from other states in taking this approach to counting nursing home deaths, research experts said — a decision that made New York's tally of nursing home deaths appear lower than it was, and that is now under federal investigation.

"It's tricky to compare state-level data, but New York is the only state that explicitly stated that they were excluding hospital-based deaths," said Priya Chidambaram, a senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research organization.

By contrast, officials in other states, including Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, said in recent interviews that they found ways to total all nursing home deaths, including residents who died at hospitals, without counting them twice, by cross-referencing the reports from nursing homes with other data sources. Research experts, including Chidambaram, said they were not aware of any other state that counted nursing home deaths as New York did.

That has left both policymakers and researchers wondering why New York didn't find a similar workaround to avoid leaving out thousands of nursing home deaths from its reported total.

"New York is an outlier of sorts when it comes to this issue," said David Grabowski, a long-term care expert and policy professor at Harvard Medical School.

The simplest explanation is that the Cuomo administration didn't want the public or federal authorities to know the full extent of COVID-19 deaths among New York's nursing home residents. The reason for that can be traced to 25 March 2020 directive that forced nursing homes to blindly admit patients without testing to verify if they were potentially contagious, including patients who had been treated for coronavirus infections, because it would expose them to the risk of facing criminal charges for negligent homicide or manslaugher under state and federal statutes.

This article is worth reading in full because it also reveals New York's Department of Health was explicitly collecting data from nursing homes for the number of residents who died of COVID outside their facilities. They had the information, Governor Cuomo and members of his administration knowingly covered it up.