Making sense of the continuing battles over nursing home deaths data
Gov. Andrew Cuomo wearing a mask. Mike Groll / Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
A state judge has ordered the New York Department of Health to provide details about COVID-19 related deaths in nursing homes after a right-leaning think tank struggled to get the data from the Cuomo administration, the Times Union reports.
The department must now hand over the information within five days and must pay the legal fees accrued by the Empire Center for Public Policy, which filed the lawsuit after the health department withheld the information.
The ruling comes as the Cuomo administration is under heightened scrutiny over its handling of nursing home deaths throughout the pandemic. Attorney General Letitia James released a report last week suggesting that COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes could have been undercounted by as much as 50%. Soon after, the state released new data that included an additional 3,800 deaths related to nursing homes, increasing the death toll in the state’s nursing homes by more than 40%. Those figures represented long-term care residents who had died in hospitals and had not previously been counted toward the number of deaths in nursing homes.
State lawmakers are ramping up their responses accordingly: Republican elected officials have been pushing to use subpoenas to obtain more information about the state’s response to coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, while other legislators are pursuing legislation to set minimum ratios between nurses and patients in nursing homes and hospitals.