5 November 2021: The Forgotten Nursing-Home Tragedy

The Forgotten Nursing-Home Tragedy

This opinion piece surprisingly appears, in all places, the New York Times. Here's an excerpt from Jay Caspian Kang's article:

On March 25, 2020, as the pandemic was spreading unabated through the state of New York, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a directive that effectively forced nursing homes to accept Covid-19 patients who had been released from hospitals, so long as they were deemed stable. Even during those early days of the American emergency, such a decision should have been unthinkable. Elder-care facilities had already become locuses of death around the world, requiring especially strict scrutiny and protocol.

A month later, Cuomo used his emergency powers to install liability relief for nursing homes and hospitals. This order provided expansive protections against lawsuits for nursing homes, which, along with hospitals, had been big contributors to his 2018 campaign and which have powerful lobbies (The protections were lifted this past April.)

In February of this year, The Associated Press reported that over 9,000 Covid patients had been placed in nursing homes as a result of Cuomo’s order, which was 40 percent more than the State Health Department had previously reported. The New York State attorney general’s office also alleged that the state had undercounted the number of people who had died in nursing homes by up to 50 percent. In March, The Times reported that aides for Cuomo had purposefully obscured the number of nursing home deaths, which, in part, led to several top public health officials resigning in protest. (In response to these allegations, the New York State Health Department released a 37-page rebuttal that shifted blame away from Cuomo’s policy choices and mostly seemed to target health care workers as the main culprits.)

That's generally a good summary of Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home scandals, but Kang errs in reporting the timing of the legal immunity Cuomo gifted to nursing home and hospital operators. That deal was struck on 2 April 2020, one week after the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, a little over a week before any excess deaths among nursing home residents whose first exposure resulting from COVID patients being dumped out of New York hospitals would start showing up in the state's official records.

Kang gets to the subject of the title given to his op-ed by the NY Times' editors in the final paragaphs, which incorporates the analysis of NY Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens):

There seems to be some apathy among the public toward this issue. How do you account for that?

The issue is super complex. There’s so many layers to health care, Medicaid, Medicare. It is complex for even the smartest lawyers. It is also very confusing for average Americans.

As a society, we’ve also become desensitized to older people getting killed. It’s almost as though it’s reached the point where it’s easier to look the other way, just to get back on the treadmill.

Unfortunately, the political courage is very lacking. Because it’s not just about Cuomo and the policies; it’s about the ecosystem of establishment politics that propped up and validated people like Andrew Cuomo for many years. Those in power now see politics as business. They submit to power, they cut deals, they protect markets at all costs and consistently hide behind words like “industry stability.” And that’s also a systemic problem that we need to fix.

We'll disagree with a portion of that assessment in the sense that the core issue in the Cuomo COVID nursing home deaths scandals is not all that complex. No one who has seriously looked at the deadly policy choice made by the Cuomo administration, outside of their partisan defenders, sees it as anything other than a very bad decision that would unnecessarily increase the risk of death from COVID to those most vulnerable to it that would have an exceptionally high probability of leading to tragic outcomes.

Kim's description of the role establishment politics in contributing to public apathy is however spot on. That's one reason why we were surprised to see the op-ed in the New York Times, which is largely an establishment organ for the Democratic Party, whose editors and reporters have done little to promote or advance news of the main COVID nursing home deaths scandals. They chose instead to promote lesser, more targeted aspects of the Cuomo scandals such as the sexual harassment allegations and Andrew M. Cuomo's pandemic "leadership" book deal, which was very much in the political party's interest. Doing so limits the political damage to the establishment party members.