NY Senate Investigation of Cuomo's Handling of COVID-19 in Nursing Homes is Stalled

 

It seems that politics takes precedence over needless deaths due to COVID-19 in New York. Cuomo's malfeasance must be addressed in full.

Remove Governor Cuomo from his position.

Betsy Combier
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Governor Andrew Cuomo

Impeachment, Investigations Stall Nursing Home Probe 

JOHN WHITTAKER, jwhittaker@post-journal.com, May 13, 2021

State Senate probe of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of COVID-19 in nursing homes is taking a back seat to the Assembly’s impeachment inquiry for Cuomo.

Sen. Rachel May, D-Syracuse, made the statement in response to a question by Sen. Sue Serino, R-Hyde Park, in regard to a statement in March by Sen. James Skoufis, D-Newburgh. Skoufis had told The New York Post he would consider a probe led by the Senate Investigations Committee, in coordination with the Senate Aging Committee.

Serino asked May the status of that investigation during a Senate Aging Committee meeting on Tuesday.

“My understanding is the Assembly’s Impeachment inquiry took precedence over that, so we are waiting for the various investigations that are ongoing, including an FBI investigation to run their course,” May said. “That’s my understanding.”

Serino’s request came after May denied Serino’s motion for the Aging Committee to issue a subpoena for Dr. Howard Zucker, state health commissioner, to appear before the Aging Committee to discuss a Feb. 10 phone call between Democratic lawmakers and Cuomo administration staff members during which Melissa DeRosa, secretary to Cuomo, said the administration froze and admitted withholding information about nursing home deaths from state legislators who had been requesting the information for months.

“New Yorkers deserve absolute transparency on this issue,” Serino said. “Yet to date the committees that can take action to get to the bottom of how and why decisions were made that impacted nursing home residents during the pandemic have refused to leverage their full power to do that. You yourself come from the world of academia, Madame Chair.”

“At the very least don’t you think we owe it to those who have been impacted to perform a complete top to bottom review of the state’s handling of the COVID crisis in our nursing homes? Without that, we can’t set effective state policy and we can’t be fully prepared going forward.”

May denied the request, ruling the motion out of order before giving Serino a chance to appeal. State Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, and Aging Committee member seconded Serino’s motion.

“We have the power here to do this now,” Borrello said. “Rattling sabers in front of TV cameras is not where we get this done. We can get it done here in Albany with this committee by approving this motion so that we can have a subpoena issued to have Dr. Zucker, Melissa DeRosa and everyone else appear before this committee. Let’s talk about this partial transcript, this FOIL request that was denied. There are several missing minutes from that transcript which really reminds me of another recording where several minutes were missing — and certainly that’s the Watergate scandal that brought down an entire presidency.”

Serino filed a Freedom of Information Law request for a transcript of the Feb. 10 meeting. That request was denied in part because the governor’s office issued a transcript of the event. Serino has argued that the denial implies that the meeting recording must differ in a way substantial enough to set it apart from the transcript that was readily released, and has appealed the FOIL denial.

“As chair, it is my prerogative and I’m going to rule this motion out of order pursuant to Rule 7, Section 2,” May said. “I also will mention that having been part of that conversation that the transcript is quite accurate … There’s nothing missing that I’m aware of from that transcript. In any case, I rule it out of order.”

Cuomo Says Nursing Homes Accepted Coronavirus Patients For the Money and Tries To Exonerate Himself in the Nursing Home Scandal

OP-ED: ‘PERFECT STORM’ IN NURSING HOMES SHOWS NEED FOR STRONGER OVERSIGHT

NY State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker Tries To Clear His Boss Gov. Cuomo For the Nursing Homes' Deaths...He Fails

Firemen don personal protective equipment as they enter the Cobble Hill Health Center nursing home, one of the worst hit residences by the pandemic in Kings County. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Dr. Howard Zucker

The conclusion, below, of Dr. Howard Zucker, New York State Health Commissioner, that the numerous deaths which led to the "nursing homes scandal" can actually be pinned on staff members, is a joke. A sad one. 

We have posted what happened:

Cuomo Says Nursing Homes Accepted Coronavirus Patients For the Money and Tries To Exonerate Himself in the Nursing Home Scandal

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 Nursing Home Scandal

as well as opinions from leading journalists:

Miranda Devine: Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a Hypocrite on Life, Death and Nursing Homes

Michael Goodwin: Cuomo’s Nursing Home Reversal is Too Little, Too Late For Those Now Dead

Zucker's motive, it seems to me, is to divert blame away from his boss, Governor Andrew Cuomo in the numerous deaths. Good luck with that!

We aren't buying this incredible claim and blame. Governor Cuomo ordered that patients testing positive for COVID-19 must be returned to their residences at the nursing homes. That was his mistake.

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NEW YORK NURSING HOME STAFFS UNKNOWINGLY SPREAD COVID-19 TO PATIENTS EARLY ON, REPORT FINDS

By Robert Pozarycki, Brooklyn Paper, July 7, 2020

Months before science and experience revealed the devastating spread and dangerous nature of COVID-19, staff members, and visitors at New York’s nursing homes unknowingly exposed their patients to the highly infectious and deadly disease.

That was the primary conclusion of the state Health Department’s report on the COVID-19 pandemic in New York state nursing homes released Monday. State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker outlined the details of the report, which sought to dispel widely-spread falsehoods about the state’s handling of the health crisis, during a July 6 press conference in Manhattan.

Critics of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the crisis have blamed him for the high number of nursing home deaths in New York during the height of the pandemic. They’ve pointed to a March 25 directive on admission policy for patients hospitalized and later discharged for COVID-19 as evidence of the alleged mismanagement.

But Dr. Zucker said Monday that the facts simply do not support such a conclusion.

Nursing home patients who wound up in the hospital with COVID-19 were no longer contagious upon their return and therefore did not introduce COVID-19 to the facility.

If anything, Zucker said, the COVID-19 virus was in the facility long before any patient wound up becoming infected.

The report concluded that nursing home staff members likely contracted COVID-19 as early as mid-February and wound up spreading it to patients while asymptomatic. Though the first official New York state COVID-19 case was detected on March 1, a study by the Mount Sinai Health Care System of blood samples collected in February found COVID-19 antibodies in the samples as early as the week of Feb. 23.

That means that a number of New Yorkers, including health care workers, likely had the coronavirus in February and didn’t realize it. At that point in the global pandemic, there were suspected COVID-19 cases in New York, and the only tests available to the state were based out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.

“I want to be clear… this is not to place the blame on nursing home staff,” Zucker said Monday. “We’re here to look at the signs and try to figure out the data. We need to look at this from that moment in time.”

The report found that nearly a third of all nursing home workers in New York state contracted COVID-19, likely picking the virus up through community spread. They then unknowingly brought the disease to work with them, infecting nursing home patients.

Visitors to nursing homes likely also exposed nursing home patients to COVID-19 before the pandemic took hold in New York state, Zucker added.

The peak in nursing home fatalities, on April 8, occurred six days before the peak of nursing home admissions following COVID-19 infection, April 14, Zucker added. There was also a direct correlation between nursing home staff infections and the number of nursing home deaths.

“COVID-19 was already in the nursing homes,” he said. “From innumerable conversations [with nursing home administrators], the vast majority of residents who went to the hospital had respiratory issues, invariably caused by COVID. The admissions and readmissions did not introduce COVID to the nursing homes.”

While that explains the spread of the infection, the commissioner went into the reasons for such high numbers of nursing home deaths. He suggested that the frailty of most under care at nursing homes contributed to their demise from COVID-19.

“It goes without saying that most nursing home residents are frail,” Zucker said. “Their bodies have weathered the test of time. The slightest challenge to their physiology can be catastrophic. Any disruption to their life pattern can have adverse effects on the elderly.”

He also dispelled the notion that lower-quality nursing homes had higher rates of death from COVID-19, noting that five-star rated facilities had a 12% higher mortality rate.

If there’s a scapegoat for the horrors suffered in New York’s nursing homes, the commissioner concluded, it’s the virus itself.

“If you’re going to place blame, I would blame the coronavirus,” Zucker told reporters. “We didn’t know [then], no one knew the virus was here when it was here. … The data from the antibody studies confirmed that. They (nursing home staff) worked diligently to care for those in the nursing homes.”

Read the full report on the state Health Department’s website, health.ny.gov.

This story first appeared on AMNY.com.

Betsy McCaughey: New York’s Nursing Home Horrors Are Even Worse Than You Think

Andrew Cuomo

In March-April 2020 New Yorkers gave Governor Andrew Cuomo huge acclaim for his daily COVID-19 TV appearances, but this praise did not last.

People in NY State as well as in the rest of the United States are appalled at his policy of sending seniors who tested positive to nursing homes and/or keeping seniors in nursing homes without adequate protections against the virus, only to die.

Reports now say that 26,000 people have died in nursing homes due to the coronavirus.

See:
N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's careless cruelty shows in coronavirus nursing home policy

Shame of Andrew Cuomo’s blame game: Goodwin

The media, especially the NY POST, documented every bad decision Cuomo made, and then some. Andrew Cuomo's ridiculous on-camera joke-fest with his brother Chris Cuomo fell flat and now only brings the Cuomo brothers well-deserved disgust.

We are with the NY POST on this issue.

They both need to be removed from any public forums, and Andrew should be investigated. He will, hopefully, be sued by relatives of the dead seniors who died because of his nursing home policy (dead=trash)

Betsy Combier, betsy.combier@gmail.com
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Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Health Department mandated on March 25 that nursing homes had
to accept coronavirus patients and barred requiring any COVID-19 tests for admission Mike Groll/Office of Governor Andrew Cuomo

New York’s nursing home horrors are even worse than you think
NY POST, May 30, 2020

Patricia Castillo remembers when the Newfane Rehab and Health Care Center, where her mother lived, notified her that a patient had just been admitted from a nearby Niagara County hospital with COVID-19.

Jill Sawyer, whose father lived at the same nursing home, remembers getting notified, too. “It was just a death sentence,” said Sawyer. The virus raced through Newfane, killing Castillo’s mother and Sawyer’s father and 24 other residents.

“My father was only 70 years old,” Sawyer sighs, and he was still “shuffling around and calling me 20 times a day.” Now, she says the phone doesn’t ring and she misses that.

COVID-19 has killed at least 11,000 to 12,000 nursing-home and assisted-living residents in New York, nearly double what the state admits to. And as the deaths mount, so have the lies and cover-ups.

The carnage started in March, when hospitals inundated with COVID-19 patients insisted on clearing out elderly patients, even if they were still infected, and sending them to whatever nursing homes had empty beds. To swing that, they had to get rid of a safety regulation requiring patients to test negative twice for COVID-19 before being placed in a home. The state Health Department willingly complied.

On March 25, Gov. Cuomo’s Health Department mandated that nursing homes had to accept COVID patients and barred requiring any COVID tests for admission. Facilities like Newfane had to fly blind, not knowing which incoming patients had it.

The American Health Care Association called it a “recipe for disaster.” The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths urged Cuomo to change course.

Instead, New York’s health commissioner, Howard Zucker, began fudging the death statistics, which concealed the consequences: Until late April, New York had reported all nursing-home residents who died from COVID-19, whether they died at the home or after being hospitalized. That’s standard. But as the toll soared, the state quietly shifted to reporting only deaths at the homes. That reduced the number to 6,062 — terrible but only half the truth.

The reality is, at least another 17,000 elder-care patients with COVID-19 were sent to hospitals, and an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 of them have died, with death rates highest for those on ventilators, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association’s mortality rates.

Bottom line: 11,000 to 12,000 nursing-home and assisted-living residents have died from COVID-19, half of all the virus deaths statewide.

The health-care think tank American Commitment also pegs the deaths at 12,000.

That awful death toll didn’t have to happen. It’s six times the number of nursing-home fatalities as in Florida or California, both more populous states.

Cuomo also tried to shift the blame to President Trump, pointing to a Trump administration statement issued on March 13. But the Cuomo administration is twisting it. The statement recommended nursing homes admit patients even if they were coming from a hospital battling COVID-19, not that patients with COVID-19 themselves had to be admitted.

In fact, on March 18, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautioned against allowing COVID-19 to invade a nursing home, warning that “it has the potential to result in high attack rates among residents, staff members and visitors.”

Cuomo’s “attempt to deflect blame onto the president sickens me,” says Castillo.

New York stuck with its deadly policy until May 10, way too long. Why? Because it wasn’t a mistake. It was a sell-out.

The hospital industry’s lobbying organization, the Greater New York Hospital Association, is a mega-donor to the state Democratic Party’s housekeeping committee, which helps elect Cuomo. It gave over $1 million in 2018. The hospital industry holds more sway in Albany than real estate or Wall Street.

No wonder Cuomo’s Health Department does the industry’s bidding.

Castillo is pained that her mother had to die alone, “isolated from those who loved her.” She hopes someone will “hold the governor’s feet to the fire.”

At the least, New Yorkers should demand a health department that protects the vulnerable instead of catering to political donors.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York, the chairwoman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and author of the forthcoming book “The Next Pandemic.”

FILED UNDER 

Miranda Devine: Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a Hypocrite on Life, Death and Nursing Homes

The updates posted below about the dead=trash nursing home scandal in New York show that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his brother Chris Cuomo, and the Cuomo cabal could not care less about what the general public thinks about their health and welfare for NY State's citizens into a trash bin.

The real tragedy is that New Yorkers have a clown as the Governor, a man who wants fame and glory much more than the safety of the people in his constituency. 

And, he's blaming everyone but himself for the scandal.

Wake up, New York!

Betsy Combier
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Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a hypocrite on life, death and nursing homes: Devine

NY POST May 20, 2020

In his daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was as haughty and boastful as ever.

The difference this time was that the Albany press pack didn’t give him a free pass.

It’s incredible how highly he rates himself when he has presided over the most COVID deaths of any state in the nation by far — 22,976 as of Wednesday, some seven times more than California, 11 times more than Florida. New York still hasn’t come to grips with why that is. The disparity is not a random act of God, as the governor would have us believe.

He bears at least some culpability. He was slower to respond to the threat of the virus. And then he compounded that error with the unforgivably callous act of forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients — a death sentence for other residents as the infection spread like wildfire.

And yet, not a trace of worry do we see on Cuomo’s tanned face.

There is no remorse, just buck-passing.

Wednesday, for instance, he blamed President Trump for the nursing-home deaths. The chutzpah is astonishing.

But at least he faced tough questions about a potential federal probe into his March 25 directive to nursing homes.

“I have refrained from politics,” he said, laughably. “But anyone who wants to ask ‘why did the state do that with COVID patients and nursing homes,’ it’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance.

“So they should ask President Trump.”

Cuomo even tried to claim that the more-than-5,500 deaths connected to nursing homes in New York was a better toll, per capita, than most other states.

Howard Zucker

But the state Department of Health seems to have fudged the death toll, admitting it does not count nursing-home residents who ended up dying in hospital of the coronavirus, so the real numbers are much higher.

Asked about this convenient accounting, Cuomo returned to Trump: “The state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance . . . No numbers were changed.”

A reporter pointed out that Cuomo has shown a “willingness to thwart President Trump at other times.” Why not on his March 25 nursing-home directive?

Good question, which ­Cuomo couldn’t answer.

Instead, he switched to blaming the nursing homes.

“In retrospect, do you think that was a bad decision? Do you think it contributed to the death toll?”

“No,” said Cuomo. “Because you have to be saying the nursing homes were wrong in accepting COVID-positive patients.”

It is Kafkaesque. First, he orders nursing homes to obey a directive with his name emblazoned at the top of the page: “All NHs must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals . . . No resident shall be denied readmis­sion or admission to the NH solely on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”

The nursing homes were “prohibited” in that March 25 directive even from COVID-testing discharged patients.

But now that the policy has blown up in his face, he blames those same nursing homes for doing what he ordered them to do.

“We always had alternative beds . . . Any nursing home could just say, ‘I can’t handle a COVID person.’ ”

Yet in April he told a reporter at a press conference that the nursing homes “don’t have the right to object.”

His reversal of the directive on Mother’s Day was a tacit acknowledgement of wrong­doing, as was the legal indemnity for nursing homes that he reportedly slipped into the state budget in late March.

The terrible thing about ­Cuomo is that he has the appearance of being everything he’s not. He is a facsimile of a take-charge alpha male who stands up and takes responsibility. In reality, he behaves like a dithering, vain, deceitful bully.

He appears to be a moral Catholic family man who talks about his days as an altar boy and expresses concern for the sanctity of life.

“To me, I say the cost of a human life, a human life is priceless. Period,” he philosophized one day while trying to justify his decision to keep everyone in lockdown.

But it’s not true. He doesn’t think every human life is precious at all.

Last year he pushed for ­euthanasia legislation and gloated about signing into law the state’s late-term abortion laws. He even had One World Trade Center lit in hot pink in an obscene celebration of death.

And didn’t he just tell us breezily last week, as the heat from his nursing-home fiasco dialed up: “Older people, vulnerable people are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen despite whatever you do.”

He made sure of it.

We knew from the start of the pandemic that the frail elderly were most at risk. Florida, with its big retired population, moved early to protect nursing homes.

A mistake is one thing, but Cuomo’s lack of remorse or self-doubt is chilling.

“I feel very good about how exhaustive I have been in communicating,” he boasted on Wednesday.

It is true he has been communicating “exhaustively.”

His “love gov” routine — joking around with his brother on CNN and strutting his stuff as New York’s most eligible bachelor — has done wonders for his approval ratings.

But it doesn’t save the people who died distressing deaths, unnecessarily and alone, in nursing homes that he knew could barely cope at the best of times.

Cuomo brothers' jokey CNN interview ignoring nursing home controversy sparks outrage

Health Commissioner Howard Zucker's approach to the coronavirus crisis in nursing
homes is even worse than critics thought. Credit: Hans Pennink

Health Commissioner Zucker’s nursing-home failures were worse than thought

By Post Editorial Board

Health Commissioner Howard Zucker’s approach to the coronavirus crisis in nursing homes is even worse than we’d thought: It turns out his Department of Health didn’t even try to track deaths in homes for a full month after the state reported its first fatalities.

New York’s first confirmed COVID-19 deaths came March 14, but it wasn’t until April 17 that DOH began comprehensively asking nursing-home administrators how many residents had died of the disease, the Syracuse Post-Standard has revealed.

The department was in contact — sending daily questionnaires asking how many masks and how much hand sanitizer homes had on hand, among other data. But it wasn’t until news broke of growing outrage among residents’ families that the state thought to systematically ask the most crucial question.

And then DOH just flailed: It e-mailed homes on April 17 at 7:03 a.m. to ask, “What is the total number of residents who have died in your nursing home of COVID-19?” It set an 8:45 a.m. deadline for replies.

The next day, it ordered administrators to document every coronavirus death over the prior six weeks — in a noon e-mail with a 2:30 p.m. deadline.

All this, as Zucker mandated on March 25 that homes take in COVID-positive patients. That’s right: He gave that order without having even tried to learn how many residents were dying from the bug. (Then again, this is the guy who ordered EMTs to not bother trying to resuscitate heart-attack victims until The Post exposed that madness.)

Zucker seems to have focused purely on keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, to the point of sending infected patients into the facilities housing those most vulnerable to the bug. Now the virus has taken some 5,600 nursing-home lives, and experts believe the true toll is far higher.

Gov. Cuomo has repeatedly insisted his team is basing all its moves on the data, yet Zucker wasn’t even collecting key info on the most at-risk population. Surely the Empire State deserves a better health commissioner than this.

‘We’re Just Horrified’: Why a Springsteen Sideman Took On Nursing Homes

Nils Lofgren, left, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s band, is suing a long-term
care facility where his mother-in-law lived.Credit...Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

The "nursing home scandal is not going away soon.

See:

Michael Goodwin: Cuomo’s Nursing Home Reversal is Too Little, Too Late For Those Now Dead

CNN: New York City Puts Bodies Into Trucks Lacking Refrigeration, Lies About Numbers of Dead From COVID-19

Betsy Combier, betsy.combier@gmail.com
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'We’re Just Horrified’: Why a Springsteen Sideman Took On Nursing Homes

After his mother-in-law was infected with the coronavirus, a guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band became determined to make nursing homes accountable.

When the coronavirus outbreak was only manifesting itself in horrifying headlines from Italy and China, Nils Lofgren, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and his wife, Amy, moved her mother into Brookdale Senior Living, a well-regarded long term care facility in Florham Park, N.J.

Almost immediately, Patricia J. Landers, Mrs. Lofgren’s mother, began complaining about missing medications and lapses in supervision. The family began to notice a pattern of neglect, particularly in treating her dementia. Then, in early April, Mrs. Landers, 83, was discovered by local police officers walking aimlessly on a frigid night, three miles away from Brookdale, shivering, bruised and confused. It was her fourth escape from the facility since she arrived in January.

A week later, Mrs. Landers was admitted to a hospital in Montclair, where she tested positive for Covid-19.

Incensed and feeling betrayed, the Lofgrens began to explore legal options when they ran into a troubling trend: Lobbyists from nursing homes across the country were pushing for immunity protection from lawsuits during the coronavirus crisis.

“It’s a pledge they made, a sacred pledge, to take care of your father, your mother, your grandparents, and they put it in writing, by the way, and now they don’t want to have any responsibilities because, why, it’s too hard?” Mr. Lofgren said. The family accelerated their efforts and filed a lawsuit against Brookdale on Wednesday.

“We’re just horrified that people’s first reaction is, ‘Well we’re making a lot of money, but now let’s make sure we’re not liable for what we promised to do, in writing,’” Mr. Lofgren said. “Don’t forget, they look you in the eye and say your loved one will be cared for.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Brookdale declined to discuss Mrs. Landers’s case specifically.

“As a matter of company policy, Brookdale does not comment on or get ahead of ongoing legal proceedings,” said Heather Hunter, a public relations manager for the company. “I will say that we work hard to maintain an open and constructive dialogue with families about their loved one and the best way that we can work together to help each resident live their best life in their community.”

Brookdale in Florham Park has, as of Wednesday, only 10 reported cases of coronavirus at the facility, according to the New Jersey Department of Health. No one at the facility has died from the virus. After her original diagnosis, Ms. Landers is now recovering from Covid-19.

As nursing homes around the country have been ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, killing more than 29,100 residents and staff members as of Wednesday, facilities have been scrambling to protect themselves from lawsuits.

In April, New Jersey’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, signed a law that “provides civil and criminal immunity to certain health care professionals and health care facilities during public health emergency and state of emergency.” The intent of the law was to protect health care workers coming out of retirement or shipping in from other states from lawsuits as they dealt with the unknowns of the virus. The governor’s office said that the law would indeed cover nursing homes for coronavirus cases, though not in instances of gross negligence or fraud.

Even in the face of the New Jersey law, Mr. Lofgren and his family were determined to take action, knowing that his status in New Jersey as a guitarist for the state’s pre-eminent hero would call attention to the issue.

“We think that this is going to be just the tip of the iceberg, and the care provided to the senior citizens and parents and grandparents over the past weeks has been nothing short, in the majority of cases, of grossly negligent,” said Andrew Miltenberg, the lawyer for the Lofgrens. “And the industry as a whole, its response has been to push for immunity.”

The lawsuit describes the ordeal as “every child’s worst nightmare” and follows a familiar path of confusing information and radio silence as nursing homes were quickly overrun by the virus. The family accuses the facility of negligence, fraud, deceptive trade practices and a violation of a New Jersey state law that protects the rights of nursing home residents.

Though New Jersey recently signed the law protecting health care facilities, Mr. Miltenberg is confident they still have a case.

For Mr. Lofgren, the battle extends beyond his family.

“This is not to take the light off what has been a very demoralizing, tragic story for my mother-in-law that’s still being written,” Mr. Lofgren said. “Shining a light on this problem is important.”

Mr. Lofgren, who is also a member of Neil Young’s band Crazy Horse, said he knew he was fortunate to even be in a position to have a lawyer who can help them bring a case in New Jersey, especially when the law surrounding the coronavirus outbreak is challenging and confusing.

“It’s a nightmare because 99 percent of most people can’t even afford a lawyer,” he said. “And they just take it, and their families are decimated by it.”

After she left the hospital, Ms. Landers moved to a different facility, Care One, in Livingston, N.J. But the family remains shaken.

“It’s unconscionable and immoral and disgusting,” Mr. Logren said. “It’s like their true colors are coming out, and I hope we can hold them accountable.”