8 February 2021: NY COVID Death Data for LTC Facilities Comes Out; Cuomo "We're No. 46" Claim Is Now Entirely False

New York Reveals Another 1,516 COVID-19 Deaths in Long-Term Care Facilities

The Empire Center's lawsuit against the New York Department of Health was instrumental in forcing that agency to finally begin acknowledging the full toll of COVID-19 among nursing home residents. In this article, the Empire Center reports New York's Department of Health was also undercounting COVID-19 deaths at New York's assisted care facilities, increasing that total by 1,516 from what the state had first reported on 6 February 2021. New York state's official COVID-19 death toll among elderly, sick New Yorkers residing at nursing homes or assisted care facilities is now at least 14,932, which means over 2 out of every 5 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in New York occurred among the residents of these facilities.

What to make of New York's revised nursing-home coronavirus numbers

The Washington Post provides a service that helps visualize part of the reason why the Cuomo administration has sought to hide the full extent of COVID-19 deaths among New York's nursing home residents. The following chart from the newspaper's analysis shows how New York's relative position jumped from near the bottom to above average as it was forced to use a more similar system of accounting as all other states have used throughout the pandemic:

The chart does not reflect the additional 1,516 COVID-19 deaths of assisted care facility residents that New York's Department of Health acknowledged after 6 February 2021.

Before Judge O'Connell's ruling forced him to come clean, Governor Cuomo was claiming that New York outperformed most other states in the measure of COVID-19 nursing home deaths. After properly accounting for the at-risk population however, the Washington Post's analysis puts paid to that particular claim from the Governor's 29 January 2021 press conference.