The New York Department of Health broke the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) when it refused to reveal the total number of COVID-19 deaths tied to nursing homes, a report said.
The FOIL request was issued in August by the Empire Center for Public Policy. The report said that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s health department refused to answer the inquiry.
A state judge said that the state is clearly in violation of the statute and had plenty of time to present the numbers. Albany Supreme Court Justice Kimberly O’Connor said in a decision that “in the time we’ve been fighting the health department to get this information, we’ve had a whole second wave.”
New York’s Attorney General Letitia James announced last month that the death toll in state nursing homes tied to coronavirus infections could be more than 50 percent higher than thought due to the Cuomo administration’s alleged move to underreport the number of deaths at these facilities.
“While we cannot bring back the individuals we lost to this crisis, this report seeks to offer transparency that the public deserves and to spur increased action to protect our most vulnerable residents,” James said. “Nursing homes residents and workers deserve to live and work in safe environments.”
The state announced 8,711 deaths in nursing homes prior to James’ report, but then it increased the number to 12,743 as of late last month, the Post reported.
Cuomo’s office has been criticized for its decision during the onset of the virus to require these facilities to accept coronavirus-positive patients to ease the pressure on city hospitals during the onset of the outbreak. Cuomo defended his administration and said he was following federal guidelines at the time.
The New York Post ran a scathing editorial on Monday that said it took James’ lawsuit to get Howard Zucker, the state’s Health Commissioner, to “admit that the true toll was about 50 percent higher than he’d claimed.”
The paper said that even though the department of health released fatality data for individual facilities, it continues to refuse to issue daily data that would “track the results of [Cuomo’s] 25 March order.
TRENDPOST: We have been reporting since last March, when Governor Cuomo locked down the state, that his health officials ordered elderly people with the virus out of hospitals and into nursing homes. (See our 28 July article, “STAY AT HOME, GET SICK.”).
Despite his string of failures and New York State having the second-highest coronavirus death rate per 100,000 people, his popularity rating is at 57 percent.
