AG: NY nursing home deaths undercounted

The New York state health department underreported the COVID-19 death toll in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent, the state's attorney general charged Thursday.

More nursing home residents died from the coronavirus than the health department's "published nursing home data reflected and may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent", Attorney General Letitia James' investigators concluded in a 76-page report.

Her office looked at 62 of the state's roughly 600 nursing homes. They reported 1,914 deaths of residents from COVID-19, while the state's health department counted 1,229 deaths at the same facilities.

James' report said if that same pattern exists statewide, it would mean the state is underreporting deaths by nearly 56 percent.

The true COVID-19 death toll of New York nursing home residents is closer to 13,000, as opposed to the 8,677 reported on Tuesday by the state health department, according to the investigation's findings.

There was no immediate response to the report from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, who has been criticized for waiting until May to reverse a state policy that required long-term care facilities to accept recovering patients who may still test positive for COVID-19.

Cuomo and lawmakers also have been criticized for creating in March limited immunity provisions for healthcare providers relating to COVID-19.

James said it is reasonable to provide some protections for healthcare workers making decisions in good faith during an unprecedented public health crisis, but it wouldn't be appropriate or just for nursing homes owners to interpret the action as providing blanket immunity for causing harm to residents.

She recommended eliminating the immunity provisions to ensure no one can evade potential accountability.

The attorney general's office launched its investigation last spring after whistleblowers reported that residents who tested positive for the coronavirus were being placed with healthy residents and that the nursing homes were failing to adequately test workers and making "sick employees continue to work and care for residents or face retaliation or termination".

In July, the state health department released a report that sought to knock down the assertion that putting COVID-19 patients into nursing homes might have led to outbreaks. Instead, the report said that most of those patients "were no longer contagious when admitted and therefore were not a source of infection".

The report placed the blame for the more than 8,500 deaths of seniors on staffers who unwittingly infected residents.

The attorney general's investigation also said the state health department's policy to only publicly report COVID-19 deaths of residents inside nursing homes and withhold deaths of residents transferred to hospitals hindered attempts to improve conditions inside the facilities.

State Health Commissioner Dr Howard Zucker has refused to release the number of nursing home residents who died due to COVID-19 after being transferred to a hospital, which experts suggested could add thousands of deaths.

Zucker pledged in August to release the information once it could be confirmed as accurate, but that hasn't happened.