2 July 2021: New Bills Look to Stop Disease Spreading at NJ State-Run Nursing Homes

New bills for NJ veterans homes head to Murphy. Can they help prevent another outbreak?

While the timeline's primary focus is New York's man-made COVID nursing home disaster, we've often presented news from states that adopted similarly disastrous policies as the Cuomo administration. This report looks at what steps New Jersey legislators are taking to prevent more deaths at state-run nursing homes for veterans.

A slate of bills to reform some aspects of care and oversight at three state-run Veterans Homes — where at least 205 died from COVID-19 in one of the nation's worst nursing home death tolls — will head to Gov. Phil Murphy's desk after the Senate passed the measures Wednesday.

The eight bills, each of which were approved unanimously Wednesday, range from increased communications and transparency to new health care qualifications for key leadership positions. They were already passed unanimously last week by the Assembly.

The report continues to describe what happened in New Jersey's veterans homes that will sound very familiar with what happened at New York's St. Albans' nursing home for veterans.

The measures come almost 16 months after COVID-19 began to spread rapidly at the facilities claiming dozens of lives each week, especially at the Paramus and Menlo Park homes, where the vast majority of the deaths occurred.

Emails, inspection reports and interviews with staffers and families by The Record and NorthJersey.com showed troubling practices and questionable decisions by management.

For instance, the virus likely spread at Paramus due to lax infection control plans that allowed positive patients to congregate with those whose status was not yet known as late as the third week of April 2020.

Managers of the homes were so adamantly opposed to having staff wear masks in the first month of the pandemic that they devised penalties with help from Gov. Phil Murphy's office, according to internal emails.

Four leaders at the Department of Veterans and Military Affairs were ousted from their positions by Murphy in October, including the two CEOs of the Paramus and Menlo Park homes.

Although New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy's administration adopted many of the same policies and practices as New York's Cuomo administration, Murphy does not appear to have actively engaged in covering up the full extent of COVID deaths among New Jersey nursing home residents and has taken some measures to impose accountability on lower ranking individuals in New Jersey's state government, such as the October firings described in the excerpt.

That doesn't address Governor Murphy's accountability for the hundreds of excess COVID deaths that claimed the lives of New Jersey nursing home residents from his administration's nearly carbon-copied version of the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, but it does emphasize how much worse the Cuomo administration's policies and actions have been.

For more timeline entries referencing New Jersey's COVID nursing home scandal, click here.