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NY State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker Tries to Deny Undercount of Nursing Home Deaths

NY State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker Tries to Deny Undercount of Nursing Home Deaths

    New York State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, MD, released a statement that weakly denies the bombshell accusation of NY Attorney General Letitia James that Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths by up to 50%.

    New York's nursing home deaths have been the subject of intense scrutiny after an Associated Press investigation published in May found that Gov. Cuomo sent more than 4,300 recovering COVID patients back into nursing homes, despite concerns over whether some of those patients were still contagious.

    After receiving allegations of patient neglect that may have jeopardized the health and safety of nursing home residents and employees, in March, James launched an investigation that found that nursing home patients who were transferred to hospitals and later died of COVID were not included in the total number of nursing home deaths because those patients died outside of their places of residence.

    The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) argued that nursing home residents should be counted as “COVID nursing home deaths” whether they died in their nursing homes, or they died in hospitals, a point Dr. Zucker seems to be trying to confuse and deny.

   For instance, in a somewhat callous remark, Dr. Zucker called the number of people who were transferred from nursing homes to die in a hospital “an important data point,” that his department is in the midst of “auditing.”

    Seemingly trying to do damage control for the governor, Dr. Zucker nonsensically said that the additional number of nursing home patients who died in hospitals “does not in any way change the total count of deaths, but is instead a question of allocating the number of deaths between hospitals and nursing homes.”

   As if people cannot add together the numbers of the two places where nursing home residents passed away, Dr. Zucker claimed that the OAG report was clear that “there was no undercount of the total death toll from this pandemic…and that the total number of deaths in hospitals and nursing homes is full and accurate,” despite the fact that the nursing home residents who died in hospitals were not included in the Department of Health’s (DOH) total number of nursing home deaths. 

   Dr. Zucker, then further tried to discredit the OAG’s findings by saying that  “reporting from nursing homes is inconsistent and often inaccurate.”

   Consistent with the governor’s unrelenting and scathing criticism of former President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Zucker also attempted to blame New York’s outsize nursing home deaths on Trump.

  “Ultimately, the OAG's report demonstrates that the recurring problems in nursing homes and by facility operators resulted from a complete abdication by the Trump administration of its duty to manage this pandemic, Dr. Zucker.

Photo by: Mike Groll/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo


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