Thursday, June 03, 2021

3 June 2021: A Legal Test of New York's Reformed COVID Immunity Law for Nursing Homes

‘They lied to us’: Pending lawsuit in COVID-19 nursing home death in N.Y. could open the doors for families to sue facilities

On 2 April 2021, Governor Cuomo gifted legal immunity from COVID deaths to a powerful hospital and nursing home lobbying group, which he slipped into an emergency budget bill. That law soon face a legal test.

For three long months, as her mother recovered from knee surgery in a Long Island nursing home, Vivian Rivera-Zayas says she was repeatedly assured the 78-year-old woman was doing just fine.

And then she died from coronavirus.

The senior citizen’s shocking death left her devastated daughter with unanswered questions that she hopes to resolve with a potentially ground-breaking lawsuit alleging the nursing home was negligent because it placed her mother on a floor with people who were afflicted with COVID-19.

“How is it possible that my mother died of COVID-19?” Rivera-Zayas asked in an interview with the Daily News. “She was admitted to the nursing home for rehabilitation. They lied to us, because they didn’t tell us there was COVID-19 in the nursing home.”

Her legal action — one of the first of its kind filed in New York state— will provide an important legal test of the controversial immunity provision pushed through early last year by Gov. Cuomo to protect nursing homes, hospitals and other health care facilities during the pandemic.

“The case that we’re in court with now is important,” said attorney Brett Leitner, who represents Rivera-Zayas. “Hopefully, we can hold these nursing homes and hospitals accountable.”

Although New York's law related to the COVID immunity of nursing homes and hospitals was repealed a year later, the question of whether that reform may be applied retroactively remains unanswered.

Here is related coverage from the timeline outlining these aspects of Governor Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals:

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