Excerpt:
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the nursing homes themselves are without blame. As soon as it became obvious that there were outbreaks of the virus in any senior facility, the administrators should have been moving to set up isolation wards and impose more rigorous disinfecting and screening protocols. Some homes did that while others clearly failed. I will also agree that having a cap of $10,000 per violation of the state’s health codes amounts to a slap on the wrist and doesn’t provide much incentive to do better.
With all of that said, however, Cuomo’s team is still completely ignoring the elephant in the room. There were nursing homes in New York at the start of the pandemic that were trying to refuse reentry to residents who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. It was Andrew Cuomo, acting under the extraordinary executive emergency powers granted to him by the state legisature that ordered all of the homes to accept returning residents and forbade them from requiring a negative COVID test as part of the process.
Cuomo also threatened non-compliant nursing homes with crippling fines or the loss of their license to operate. So while some of the nursing homes were clearly failing to take all possible precautions, even the ones who were trying to do the right thing were forbidden from doing so. There is one and only one person responsible for the subsequent deaths in those homes and that’s the person who picked up his pen and issued the orders.
Author(s): Jazz Shaw
Publication Date: 16 February 2021
Publication Site: Hot Air