Media Doesn’t Care That People Died Because Cuomo Put Coronavirus Patients in Nursing Homes
. . .That should have changed once it was clear that one of the hottest of the pandemic’s hotspots — New York’s nursing homes — were compelled by a state regulation to take in recovering coronavirus victims, many of whom were likely still contagious.
The implication of this rule — which was apparently strictly enforced and similar to the order issued by California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration — was that facilities filled with exactly the most vulnerable population had no choice but to admit carriers of the contagion. The results of this blunder were as brutal as they were predictable. As of last week, New York’s Health Department estimated the number of nursing home patients who had died of COVID-19 to be 3,500, a total representing more than 20 percent of all the state’s fatalities.
As reports of the suffering going on in nursing homes made clear, what happened was not a function of demography or chance. The March 25 order handed down by Cuomo’s Health Department mandating that nursing homes could not reject those recovering from the illness set in motion the events that inflated the state’s COVID-19 death tolls.
Far from realizing the mistake and seeking to correct it, Cuomo was still doubling down on the order at an April 26 press conference, at which he said again that nursing homes had no right to challenge the state order and reject patients who were likely to spread the illness. . .
Yet as the New York Post reported a day later, one coronavirus hotspot, the Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn, where 55 people have died from COVID-19, had tried repeatedly to inform state Health Department officials of its lack of equipment and staff to handle the problem and received no help. Requests to transfer patients to the makeshift wards at New York’s mammoth Javits Center, a convention center that has been turned into a hospital, or the USS Comfort, the navy hospital ship that was anchored in New York Harbor before leaving due to lack of use, were turned down. (Read more from “Media Doesn’t Care That People Died Because Cuomo Put Coronavirus Patients in Nursing Homes” HERE)
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