28 May 2021: Investigation - Michigan COVID Nursing Home Deaths Possibly Double Official Stats

LeDuff: Clueless -- Michigan Doesn't Know True Nursing Home Death Toll From Covid

Michigan is one of three states that copied New York Governor Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to admit COVID patients being discharged from hospitals to free up bed space without testing to determine whether they were still contagious and might present a risk to nursing home residents. The others are New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Although Michigan Govenor Gretchen Whitmer imposed this policy, Michigan's data for COVID deaths among its nursing home residents has been far below these other states. This article reports on the findings of a new investigation, which provides a compelling explanation for why Michigan's COVID nursing home deaths appears so low.

It appears that Michigan wildly under-counts Covid deaths in its long term care facilities.

A joint investigation by the "No BS News Hour" and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy reveals that the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) does not do a thorough job of scrubbing vital records to determine whether people who died of Covid were nursing home residents, as its own guidelines require....

The true number of pandemic deaths inside Michigan's elder care centers may never be known. But our analysis shows that the Covid death toll may be 100 percent higher than the state reports.

Our findings are based on communications with state health officials as well as material obtained in a Freedom of Information lawsuit settlement with the Attorney General's office.

The report gets into the numbers and identifies a systemic reporting issue that has resulted in a large undercount of COVID deaths among the Michigan's nursing home residents:

Just over 19,000 people in Michigan have died from Covid-19, according to daily data posted by DHHS.

We only know for sure that approximately 5,600 people died who were residents of long-term-care facilities. This data is self-reported by those “nursing homes.” This method operates on an honor system.

Another 6,945 deaths among those 19,000 Covid-19 fatalities are classified as “vital records reviews,” according to the attorney general. These are recorded only after health officials and epidemiologists pore through death certificates across the state and determine that the cause of death was indeed Covid-19.

Here is where the problems begin. State health officials do not attempt to determine whether the people in this “vital records” group lived in a nursing home or whether they contracted the disease there, as their own guidelines require.

“Long-term care facility Covid-19 data, which is reported on this web page comes from the facilities themselves, so it doesn’t include any data from Vital Records reviews,” said Bob Wheaton, a spokesman for DHHS.

There is clearly a hole in Michigan's official statistics for the COVID-related deaths of nursing home residents, which presents a very incomplete picture of the impact of COVID-19 in the state's nursing homes. The independent investigation confirmed that hole was known by state health officials:

Steve Delie, a lawyer with the Mackinac Center, and I have learned that the state of Michigan did in fact conduct a study with a limited sample last summer to find out if people on this vital records list were residents of long-term care facilities.

Exactly 1,468 vital records were selected from March through June 2020.

Of those, 648 deaths were traced back to nursing homes and other long-term facilities. That's 44 percent. Nearly half.

Apply 44 percent to the nearly 7,000 vital records and there may be another 3,000 deaths of the institutionalized elderly unaccounted for.

If that is the case, the number of “nursing home” deaths now climbs to 8,900.

That latter figure would be consistent with the level of COVID nursing home deaths observed in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, which each adopted similar policies that "injected" COVID into the most vulnerable portions of their populations.

From this point in the summer of 2020, decisions by government officials has contributed to preventing the public from confirming the full extent of COVID deaths.

Incredibly, the work of tracing those vital records was never institutionalized.

Why? Because it was too hard.

“The 648 deaths came from a vital records review we did for deaths between March and June,” confirmed Wheaton, the DHHS spokesman. “That is not a review that we are able to do regularly due to how time-consuming it is and the amount of resources we need to devote to doing this."

This factor makes Michigan's undercount different from the Cuomo administration's deliberate cover-up of the full extent of nursing home deaths in New York. Unlike the situation in New York, state officials in Michigan did not know the full extent of COVID nursing home deaths because it never compiled the necessary data as it was required to do by law in the first place.

But they did know they had a significant undercount problem. This next part of the article examines that difference:

So what about those 6,500 remaining Covid deaths in the state's list of 19,000?

Where did those people live?

Is anybody asking?

Remember, Andrew Cuomo's administration in New York tried to fob off 4,000 nursing home deaths as hospital deaths because that's where those people actually died. But that's not where the people lived, or where they contracted Covid, as reporting guidelines require.

And the Cuomo cronies knew it. They kept it quiet because it was an election year and the Trump Justice Department had opened an investigation. “We froze,” said Melissa DeRosa, a top Cuomo aide, to a group of Democratic lawmakers. There have since been calls for Cuomo's impeachment.

Nonetheless, New York officials did keep count – secretly.

Not so in Michigan.

“Even when we do the manual review that is needed to link hospital deaths to long-term-care facility residents, the results are still substantially incomplete,” admitted Wheaton in an email. “If the facility resident is transferred to a hospital and subsequently dies, it can be difficult to tie that death back to a specific facility, or to the fact that the individual was even a resident of a facility. Death certificates have a field for type of place of death (such as home, inpatient, outpatient/ER, hospice, nursing home, long-term care facility, other). We also capture the name of the facility if the death occurred in a facility. The challenge has been identifying long-term-care facility residents who are transferred to, and die in hospitals since the death certificate lists where they actually died.”

While it is true that a person's place of death is listed on his death certificate, a person's place of residence is also listed, usually beneath the place of death.

That's how it is for Clarence, an 86-year-old military veteran and ward of the state.

Clarence died in a Detroit hospital last year, according to his death certificate. His residence is listed on East Grand Boulevard. An eight-second Google search confirms it to be a nursing home.

New York is able to track this data.

Michigan? Not so much. Why?

And remember, the reporting is done on an honor system. Multiple nurses and executives in these facilities have told me they dumped their death on the hospitals' tab.

Now, one important similarity between Michigan and New York:

... Gretchen Whitmer crows that Michigan (29%) has done better than national average (32%) when it comes to Covid deaths in long-term-care facilities.

Cuomo was braying the same line until called out by his own attorney general for faking the data.

As for the controversial comingling of positive people with healthy people in these facilities, as was done in Michigan as well as New York? The Empire Center for Public Policy showed a 9 percent rise in deaths in those New York facilities where the elderly were comingled.

Nursing homes and other elder facilities were at the epicenter of the entire Covid crisis. So, it is stunning to learn that the data used to make decisions on all human activity in Michigan did not exist.

Attorney General Dana Nessel said in March there were no grounds to investigate the Whitmer administration's handling of the nursing homes.

There seems to be now.

We've excerpted this piece at length because it provides a good window into the kind of information and analysis it takes to uncover what appears to be considerable negligence on the part of Michigan public health officials and Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Whether it will follow into criminal investigations as is currently taking place at the federal and state level in New York remains to be seen.