AP report: Andrew Cuomo sent 4,500 COVID-19 patients to nursing homes

  With about half of the nation’s COVID-19 deaths, New York is considered the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States. As such we have to ask why New York was so much more hard-hit than any other region, and we cannot deny that New York City is extremely congested and with people right on top of each other it is conducive to a contagion spread.

  However, the people of the Empire State have been under house arrest for months, and with the same social conditioning regulations in place as in the rest of the country we have to start looking at leadership decisions made during this crisis, and that naturally brings us to Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home directive.

  This nursing home directive–which forbade nursing homes from testing people for COVID-19 before either admitting or readmitting them to the homes–has come under heavy scrutiny from both Republicans and Democrats in recent days and now we are beginning to get some numbers which show us how disastrous this decision was.

  Here is more from the Associated Press:

More than 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The Associated Press.

AP compiled its own tally to find out how many COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes under the March 25 directive after New York’s Health Department declined to release its internal survey conducted two weeks ago. It says it is still verifying data that was incomplete.

Whatever the full number, nursing home administrators, residents’ advocates and relatives say it has added up to a big and indefensible problem for facilities that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo — the main proponent of the policy — called “the optimum feeding ground for this virus.”

  You will note the data the Associated Press saw for this report was incomplete, that number is only going to go up when all the data is reviewed. It is unbelievable to me how reckless the decision was to put people with the COVID-19 virus in nursing homes where the people most susceptible to the disease reside, especially when the Federal Government provided two military hospital ships  which were sitting empty in the harbor. It is almost as if this decision was made in spite.

  Andrew Cuomo is actually blaming the nursing homes for this:

But he continued to defend it this week, saying he didn’t believe it contributed to the more than 5,800 nursing and adult care facility deaths in New York — more than in any other state — and that homes should have spoken up if it was a problem.

“Any nursing home could just say, ‘I can’t handle a COVID person in my facility,’” he said, although the March 25 order didn’t specify how homes could refuse, saying that ”no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the (nursing home) solely based” on confirmed or suspected COVID-19.

    That is a remarkable statement! If he had no idea nursing homes were not equipped to deal with a virus which we have been told is highly contagious and deadly, especially to the elderly, he should have rejected this directive out of hand and yet he did not see a problem with it. But here he is passing the buck instead, maybe he should have consulted the nursing homes first instead of blaming them for his mistake afterwards.

  This is the man many people were touting as a great leader during this outbreak. This is the man they said looked Presidential during the crisis. And this is the man whom many were hoping would replace Joe Biden at a brokered convention.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium