Tag: nursing homes

DiNapoli: DOH Needs to Step Up Enforcement of Patient Safety Violations

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.osc.state.ny.us/press/releases/2021/03/dinapoli-doh-needs-step-enforcement-patient-safety-violations

Excerpt:

The State Department of Health (DOH) has failed to hold accountable certain health care providers including hospitals, nursing homes and individual nurses, for patient safety violations and use its power under the law to impose stronger fines. Additionally, DOH does not ensure amounts collected are directed to increase patient safety, as required, according to an audit released today by State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli.

“Lisa’s Law was created to make health care in New York safer and give patients the knowledge they need to make informed decisions,” DiNapoli said. “The Department of Health generally has improved the public’s access to health care information. Too often, however, it gives negligent health care providers a slap on the wrist by not issuing financial penalties that can act as a deterrent against future incidents and help fund improvements in patient safety. DOH needs to do better.”

Author(s): Thomas DiNapoli

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: Office of the NY State Comptroller

Cuomo Killing the Disabled and the Elderly: This Time It’s Personal

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/cuomo-killing-the-disabled-and-the

Graphic:

Excerpt:

But the other problem, of course, was that Cuomo wasn’t the only governor who sent sick people back into nursing homes. In addition to New York, there was also Michigan, California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Except it seems Cuomo was the only one who had his staff falsify data. So perhaps the others can get away with just admitting they made decisions that were very unwise.

As it is, the New York state legislature is starting an impeachment investigation, and I assume they’re not going to half-ass it like other impeachments we have heard tell of.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 11 March 2021

Publication Site: STUMP on Substack

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?

…..
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

Despite Its Much Stricter COVID-19 Policies, California’s Per Capita Death Rate Is Only Slightly Lower Than Florida’s

Mary Pat Campbell
Despite Its Much Stricter COVID-19 Policies, California’s Per Capita Death Rate Is Only Slightly Lower Than Florida’s

Excerpt:

According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the infection fatality rate for Americans who are 70 or older is something like 5.4 percent, compared to 0.5 percent for 50-to-69-year-olds, 0.02 percent for 20-to-49-year-olds, and 0.003 percent for people younger than 20. In other words, the risk for the oldest age group is 11 times the risk for the next oldest, 270 times the risk for 20-to-49-year-olds, and 1,800 times the risk for the youngest cohort.

Yet Los Angeles Times reporters Soumya Karlamanga and Rong-Gong Lin II, citing University of Florida epidemiologist Cindy Prins, write that “Florida’s older population might have, perhaps counterintuitively, prevented the virus from spreading as quickly as it did in California.” How so? “Young adults who socialize and mingle, either at work or in social settings, tend to spread the virus the most while older people are more cautious and stay home.”

Florida, of course, is a mecca for college students on spring break, whose socializing and mingling provided ammunition for critics of DeSantis’ alleged recklessness. And despite the relative timidity of elderly Americans, they account for more than four-fifths of COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Nursing homes alone account for more than a quarter of the total death toll.

Author(s): Jacob Sullum

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: Reason

Cuomo’s Office Covered Up Nursing Home Death Toll Last Summer

Mary Pat Campbell
Cuomo’s Office Covered Up Nursing Home Death Toll Last Summer

Excerpt:

Cuomo aides kept nursing home death numbers quiet. A damning new report from The New York Times suggests Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office knew as early as last June how deadly the governor’s plans were proving for nursing home residents, but still concealed this information from the public.

Early in the pandemic, Cuomo had ordered that nursing homes could not reject patients from returning to those facilities after testing positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized. He also barred the deaths of COVID-19 patients transferred from nursing homes to hospitals after catching the virus from being counted among nursing home COVID-19 deaths.

Author(s): ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: Reason

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

Why Cuomo Cooked the Books on Nursing-Home Deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/why-cuomo-cooked-the-books-on-nursing-home-deaths/

Excerpt:

What DeRosa told lawmakers had them aghast. Not only had Cuomo misled them; he had, in DeRosa’s telling, done it in order to keep relevant information hidden from U.S. investigators. If the latter were true, Cuomo administration officials could well be guilty of federal-obstruction and false-statements crimes. In other words, so shameful was their actual reason for covering up nursing-home deaths — namely, to make a wayward governor look like a fantasy hero — that Cuomo administration officials figured it was better to be seen as potentially felonious than to admit their crude political motivation.

As the New York Times reported on Thursday night, in the spring of 2020, DeRosa and other members of Cuomo’s inner circle, who have no public-health background, studiously purged the nursing-home death data from a report compiled by state health officials. The Justice Department was not eyeing them at the time. That happened months later, in August, when the feds began seeking information about the treatment of, and record-keeping about, COVID-stricken nursing-home residents by New York and three other states.

So what was going on at the time of the purge? Well — whaddya know! — it turns out that was just when Cuomo was quietly securing the state ethics approvals that would permit him to earn outside income from a book he’d decided to write. The book would inform the world about his unparalleled mastery of the COVID crisis — which, oddly enough, he contemplated as a work of nonfiction.

Author(s): Andrew McCarthy

Publication Date: 6 March 2021

Publication Site: National Review

Implications of COVID-19 Mortality Patterns for Nursing Home Regulation in New York

Mary Pat Campbell
Implications of COVID-19 Mortality Patterns for Nursing Home Regulation in New York

Graphic:

Excerpt:

In its January 28 report, the attorney general’s office argued that low staffing levels in nursing homes was associated with higher death rates from the novel coronavirus. As evidence of that connection, the report presented a table (reproduced in Table 1 below) comparing death rates in nursing homes based on their star ratings for staffing from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).[5] It showed that homes with the lowest staffing grade of one star had an aggregate COVID-19 mortality rate of 7.13 percent, compared to 4.94 percent for homes with a five-star rating.

However, that table was based on the limited data available in mid-November, which encompassed 6,645 deaths, only half the number that are documented now.

When that table is brought up to date, it shows no clear association between lower staffing grades and higher coronavirus mortality (see Table 2). Homes with a three-star staff rating showed the largest percentage of deaths, at 13.62, compared to 12.98 for two-star homes and 12.14 for one-star homes.[6]

Author(s): Bill Hammond, Ian Kingsbury

Publication Date: 4 March 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

Cuomo Aides Altered Nursing Home Report to Conceal Death Toll

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cuomo-aides-altered-nursing-home-report-to-conceal-death-toll/

Excerpt:

Aides to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo rewrote a July report by state health officials to conceal the number of nursing home residents who died from coronavirus in the state, according to reports.

Cuomo’s top aides worked to hide the fact that more than 9,000 nursing home residents had died from the virus in the state at the time, according to reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 

….

Cuomo’s aides clashed with the state’s health officials over the July report, which the Health Department worked on with the consulting firm McKinsey. The report included a chart comparing nursing home deaths in New York with other states, according to the New York Times, which showed that New York’s total of 9,250 deaths was far greater than that of the next highest state, New Jersey, which had 6,150 at that time.

The chart put the death toll at about 50 percent higher than the number the Cuomo administration had touted at the time.

Author(s): BRITTANY BERNSTEIN

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: National Review

New COVID-19 cases among nursing home residents fell 80 percent in a month

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/540614-new-covid-19-cases-among-nursing-home-residents-fell-80-percent-in-a-month?rl=1

Excerpt:

New coronavirus cases among nursing home residents have plummeted by nearly 80 percent from late December to early February, according to The New York Times.

In an analysis of federal data, the news outlet found that outbreaks at long-term care facilities have dropped at a rate almost double that of the general population.

“I’m almost at a loss for words at how amazing it is and how exciting,” David Gifford, the chief medical officer for the American Health Care Association, told the Times. “If we are seeing a robust response with this vaccine with the elderly with a highly contagious disease, I think that’s a great sign for the rest of the population.”

Author(s): Cameron Jenkins

Publication Date: 25 February 2021

Publication Site: The Hill

55% of Ontario’s nursing home workers opted for vaccine

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/55-per-cent-ontario-long-term-care-workers-vaccinated-fears-remain-1.5928220

Excerpt:

Despite the fact long-term care workers were the first in Ontario invited to get the COVID-19 vaccine last December, a little more than half of them have volunteered to get the shot.

As of this week, only 55,000 of 100,000 long-term care workers in Ontario have been inoculated, according to the province’s Ministry of Health.

Dr. Hugh Boyd, chair of the Ontario Medical Association’s section on long-term care and care of the elderly, said a lack of confidence in the vaccine and pervasive myths about the quick development and safety of the shot is at the root of the low numbers.

Author(s): Julie Ireton

Publication Date: 26 February 2021

Publication Site: CBC News

COVID-19 Death Rate at VA Nursing Homes Is 13 Times Lower Than National Average

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/02/10/covid-19-death-rate-va-nursing-homes-13-times-lower-national-average.html

Excerpt:

If you’re in a nursing home operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, data shows you’re about half as likely to contract COVID-19 as you are in a non-VA senior living facility, and 13 times less likely to die from the disease.

In the past year, 1,679 residents of VA nursing homes, which it calls community living centers or CLCs, contracted COVID-19, and 143 died “within 30 days after a positive test,” according to the department.

With more than 30,000 American veterans living in these facilities, that translates to an infection rate of 5.47 per 100 people and a death rate of less than .5%.

Author(s): Patricia Kime

Publication Date: 10 February 2021

Publication Site: Military.com