30 June 2021: COVID in a NY State-Run Nursing Home

Piles of PPE Left to Rot Outside State-Run Queens Nursing Home

This report describes the current day problem of an abundance of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at a state-run nursing home for veterans, the New York State Veterans' Home at St. Albans. It also provides background information from when it experienced shortages of PPE during the coronavirus pandemic, describing how the facility was operated during the period the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect. The following excerpts focus on that period:

Over a year ago, supply shortages at the height of the coronavirus epidemic were so acute that three nurses in a Manhattan hospital were forced to don garbage bags in lieu of medical gowns to protect themselves.

Staffers at the St. Albans veterans facility recall experiencing similar desperation at the time, when nursing homes were particularly hard-hit by the virus.

“When we needed the PPE we couldn’t even get it,” said one employee. “Now it’s being wasted.”

The facility is operated by New York's State Department of Health (NYDOH), which prioritized providing PPE to hospitals in early 2020. The next excerpt describes how care at the facility was provided and how the Cuomo administration's undercounting of COVID deaths among its residents was exposed:

As THE CITY has previously reported, staffers sounded the alarm in May 2020 that the state-run facility wasn’t properly isolating residents with presumed or even confirmed COVID, and kept them in shared rooms with a roommate not known to be ill.

The facility also failed to assign dedicated staffers to treat the residents known or presumed to have coronavirus — even though the state Department of Health required such separation in facilities with confirmed COVID cases to limit the potential spread of virus by staff.

Just before Memorial Day last year, staffers provided THE CITY with a list of the residents who had died of COVID-19, in an act of defiance intended to call attention to the state’s undercounting of deaths of veterans at the home.

The list identified 48 residents who died, at a time when state officials were acknowledging at most 35 coronavirus-related deaths.

Since the St. Albans nursing home is operated by NYDOH, it reflects how the Cuomo administration's disastrous COVID policies for nursing homes were implemented in a facility over which it had direct control. It's a microcosm of Governor Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals.