Tag: Joe Palazzolo

Cuomo Administration Questioned CDC Official About Covid-19 Nursing-Home Death Data

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomo-administration-questioned-u-s-health-officials-about-nursing-home-data-11615408672

Excerpt:

When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration learned last year that the federal government was about to release data on Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes, state officials were concerned: Would the federal numbers tell the public a different story than the state’s own?

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No other state requested details about the data release, according to the official. The federal health officials on the call described the scope of the data, how it was collected and how it compared with the state’s data.

When it was released, the federal data included fatalities inside both nursing homes and hospitals. But the federal tally of 3,525 deaths was lower than the state’s total of 5,944 because nursing homes weren’t required to report deaths to the federal government from March and April, the deadliest period for the state in the pandemic.

Author(s): Joe Palazzolo, Jimmy Vielkind

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Cuomo Advisers Altered Report on Covid-19 Nursing-Home Deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomo-advisers-altered-report-on-covid-19-nursing-home-deaths-11614910855?mod=djemwhatsnews

Excerpt:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the report’s production.

The July report, which examined the factors that led to the spread of the virus in nursing homes, focused only on residents who died inside long-term-care facilities, leaving out those who had died in hospitals after becoming sick in nursing homes. As a result, the report said 6,432 nursing-home residents had died—a significant undercount of the death toll attributed to the state’s most vulnerable population, the people said. The initial version of the report said nearly 10,000 nursing-home residents had died in New York by July last year, one of the people said.

The changes Mr. Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.

Author(s): Joe Palazzolo, Jimmy Vielkind, Rebecca Davis O’Brien

Publication Date: 4 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal