18 April 2020: NY DOH's Initiates Systematic Collection of COVID Death Data for Nursing Home Residents

Cuomo admin tracked nursing home deaths months before incomplete DOH report

This report clarifies the timing of when the Cuomo administration began systematically collecting data on the COVID-related deaths of nursing home residents.

A copy of the directive obtained by The Post is dated April 18, 2020 — about eleven weeks before a health department report that excluded the number of nursing home residents who died of coronavirus outside of their facilities.

18 April 2020 marks when New York's Department of Health began its daily collection of data on the COVID deaths among New York's nursing home residents, but the department also took action to collect the same data going back to 1 March 2020.

State Department of Health spokesman Gary Holmes told The Post in a Wednesday statement that the agency “has received HERDS information daily from more than 1,000 long term care facilities and more than 200 hospitals since the start of this pandemic.”

“In April 2020 we asked for additional information to provide a more specific clinical picture, and as part of that correspondence we asked all facilities to provide that same level of information retrospectively to March 1,” the spokesman said.

This entry was added to the historic timeline after this new information came to light on 8 April 2021.