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

Andrew Cuomo
Credit: Hans Pennink

Governor Cuomo was sending all residents who tested positive back into the nursing home where they came from, without the protections needed.

New York State Outrage: Governor Andrew Cuomo Did Not Know His State's Nursing Home Policy

The Dead=Trash Scandal in New York: Nursing Homes Are Not Accurately Reporting The Number of Deaths

Then the media picked up the story of the trucks parked outside of nursing homes and funeral homes with bodies stacked up inside, and Cuomo knew he had political hari-kari on his hands.

So, he reversed his policy.

Michael Goodwin says it's just too late. We agree.

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Cuomo’s nursing home reversal is too little, too late for those now dead 

 Michael Goodwin NY POST, May 11, 2020

Gov. Cuomo will never be confused with Fiorello La Guardia. “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut,” the legendary mayor of New York once confessed.

Unfortunately, Cuomo’s pride and political calculations don’t allow him to admit error even as he finally reverses one of the mostly deadly policy mistakes in New York history.

Nursing homes and rehabilitation centers have tallied more than 5,000 coronavirus deaths, yet the governor accepts zero responsibility despite his March 25th order forcing them to take infected patients from hospitals.

Now he says they no longer have to do that, announcing Sunday that “a hospital cannot discharge a person who is COVID positive to a nursing home.”

Indeed, the initial order denied nursing homes the right even to ask if patients being sent by hospitals had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Now hospitals must do discharge tests and only those who are negative can be referred to nursing homes.

Said one nursing home executive, “It feels at least a month too late.”

The move comes amid growing calls for an independent investigation of the nursing home catastrophe, where the death count dwarfs the total deaths in every other state except New Jersey.

Still, Cuomo claims the reversal is not a reversal, nor is it a recognition of the fatal impact of the initial order.

“Whatever we’re doing has worked, on the facts,” he insisted.

He should try selling that view to Maria Porteus. She lost her father, Carlos Gallegos, to the coronavirus in a Long Island nursing home last month soon after the state forced it to accept infected patients. She watched the governor Sunday and was left steaming.

“I’m still angry and I’m still hurt,” she said. “It’s a slap in the face for him because he’s not taking responsibility for what happened to my father and so many others.”

Porteus said she’s part of a Facebook group that has nearly 250 members who lost loved ones in nursing homes, adding: “The stories are all almost the same. And Cuomo’s still acting like he’s not the one who did this order, like it’s somebody else or it’s the nursing homes’ fault.”

Arlene Mullin, who lost her father under similar circumstances, also was unhappy with Cuomo Sunday. She said in an e-mail:

“In light of how many mothers lost their lives, it was distasteful to use his press conference as a tribute to his mother. He could have called her privately to wish her well on Mother’s Day. It was insensitive to those people whose mothers died in nursing homes due to his cruel policy.”

Cuomo insists the nursing homes “could have resisted” taking COVID-positive patients if they had no ability to care for them. The order, he seemed to be saying, was only meant to ensure that such patients were not discriminated against.

That point, he conceded, “was never really communicated,” as if the March 25 order was not meant to be taken verbatim.

So the only failure is a failure to communicate, though he didn’t specify whose failure that was. Certainly not his.

There are two gaping holes in that argument. First, nursing homes never believed they had any right to deny infected patients, saying the order from the state Department of Health would have included that option if that were the intent. The order’s language did not offer any hint of flexibility.

“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19,” it reads. “NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to ­admission or readmission.”

Worse, the order came without warning, took effect immediately and gave the homes no time to set up segregated beds and staff.

All nursing homes, good and bad, large and small, were treated as if they were fit for an influx of coronavirus patients.

The second problem with Cuomo’s claim is the case of the Cobble Hill Health Center, which lost at least 55 patients to the virus. The CEO, Donny Tuchman, showed reporters April emails where he asked state health officials for assistance and was turned down. He also asked them if COVID-19 patients he had could be sent instead to the Javits Center or the Navy ship Comfort, both of which were far below capacity. He was rejected again.

It’s true there was one way Albany officials did help beleaguered nursing homes. The packages of equipment they sent included body bags.

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

This is an ugly story that disgusts me. New York City politicos - Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio - are oblivious to human suffering during this time of suffering and treat the dead like trash? We don't yet know how many have died of coronavirus complications and/or procedural errors.

They must not be allowed to get away with this without some kind of remedy for the grieving families.

New York State Outrage: Governor Andrew Cuomo Did Not Know His State's Nursing Home Policy

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

The Dead+Trash Scandal in New York: Nursing Homes Are Not Accurately Reporting The Number of Deaths

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'So many more deaths than we could have ever imagined.' This is how America's largest city deals with its dead

By Ray Sanchez, CNN

Updated 8:40 PM ET, Sun May 3, 2020

New York (CNN)In his final moments, Ananda Mooliya reassured his wife and two sons that he was fine, though they could hear his labored breathing from the next room, over the sound of the TV.

His wife, Rajni Attavar, made soup for him. Mooliya struggled out of bed. With the help of eldest son, Amith, the 56-year-old subway station agent made his way to a kitchen chair in their Corona, Queens, home. Sweat beaded on his face. His mouth was open.

"I wiped his face," Attavar recalled through tears. "Then I called out his name. He didn't respond."

She sprinkled water on his head. Amith checked his father's weakening pulse. His younger son, Akshay Mooliya, 16, called 911. EMTs arrived and, for about 10 minutes, aided his breathing with a respiratory device.

They then covered him with a white blanket on the kitchen floor.

It was April 8 at 9:37 p.m., according to his death certificate. Immediate cause of death was listed as "Recent Influenza-Like Illness (Possible COVID-19)." Several hours would pass before his body was lifted off the floor and taken to a morgue -- and nearly three weeks before his cremation, family members said.

"I was the last person in the family to see his face before he died," Amith, 21, recalled. "I didn't even say goodbye."

The handling of Mooliya's body isn't unusual in these times.

The coronavirus death toll has overwhelmed health care workers, morgues, funeral homes, crematories, and cemeteries. Body bags pile up across the city that became the epicenter of the pandemic. On the day Mooliya died, there were 799 Covid-19 deaths in the state of New York, a one-day high. To date, the state has recorded more than 24,000 deaths, most of them in New York City.

Among the many ways, life has changed is how America's largest city deals with its dead.

Though the city doubled to about 2,000 its capacity to store bodies, funeral homes are still turning down cremations because they can't hold onto the bodies. A Brooklyn cremation chamber broke down under the sheer volume of corpses. Cremations are delayed to mid-May and beyond. Bodies rest in refrigerated trailers in funeral home parking lots. Burials are backed up.

"So many more deaths than we could have ever imagined," said Joe Sherman, the fourth-generation owner of Sherman's Flatbush Memorial Chapel in Brooklyn. "I'm doing this 43 years. I've never seen anything like it."

Two funeral homes take desperate measures

The grim struggle to keep up with death was highlighted on Wednesday when four trucks with as many as 60 decomposing bodies were discovered on a busy street outside a Brooklyn funeral home. A passerby saw fluids dripping from the trucks.

The overwhelmed funeral home ran out of space for bodies, which were awaiting cremation, according to a law enforcement source. It brought in trucks for storage. At least one truck lacked refrigeration, with body bags on ice, one source said.

"It's such a sad situation and so disrespectful to the families," Mayor Bill de Blasio told CNN Friday. "That was an avoidable situation... There were lots of ways that the funeral home could have turned to us for help. But they stayed silent. That's a rarity. Overwhelmingly, even with the horrible strain and the emotional strain, funeral homes have really stood by the families in the city and served them."

The New York State Department of Health has suspended the license of the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home. Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker called its actions "appalling, disrespectful to the families of the deceased, and completely unacceptable."

CNN sought comment from the funeral home multiple times. On Wednesday, someone identifying himself as its owner declined to comment.

On Thursday night, 18 bodies were found at an "overwhelmed" funeral home in New Jersey, State Police Colonel Patrick Callahan told reporters.

Mourners are forced to play a waiting game

After Mooliya's body was picked up from the kitchen floor, his family learned that it would be nearly three weeks before the Indian immigrant's body could be cremated.

In Hindu tradition, bodies are typically cremated a day or two after death, Amith Mooliya said. His father, a devout man who prayed before and after his subway station shifts, was cremated on April 27.

The family did not attend the cremation ceremony because of distancing guidelines.

"I lit a candle and put his photo in a frame on a table," said his son, a chemistry major at Brooklyn College. "We prayed for his soul. That was all we could really do."

A strained death care industry has made mourning harder.

"Every day I remember," Attavar, 50, said of the day her husband died. "I can't sleep. I never saw his face like that. He was the strong one. I never saw him that weak. He took care of us."

That Mooliya was with family, in the end, provided some solace. The contagion has taken many others without loved ones at their side.

"At least he was not far away from us," Attavar said. "He was home. I think that was his comfort. That he passed in the house."

Dan Wright, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 813, whose 500 members include funeral directors and cemetery workers, said the high number of deaths has slowed the back end of the system, the cemeteries and crematories.

"Obviously we can't be burying people in the dark," he said.

And social distancing has altered the way people bid loved one's farewell.

"Funerals are basically about gathering together and celebrating somebody's life and saying goodbye," Wright said. "These things have been impossible to do. Funerals directors ... have been reduced to becoming policemen to prevent people from getting together, standing too close, hugging each other."

Sherman, the Brooklyn funeral homeowner, said protecting clients and workers is a priority -- ensuring distancing and providing sufficient personal protective equipment.

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"In dealing with this pandemic our main concern is the living," he said.

There are no face-to-face meetings with grieving families. All business is handled online or over the phone.

"We don't want people in the building," Sherman said.

The number of funerals Sherman handles tripled in recent weeks. His business and the memorial home that shares the building with it last week had about 100 calls.

His funeral home alone has been doing about 30 deaths a week. Three weeks ago, Sherman said, he brought in a refrigerated container with space for an additional 30 bodies.

"I'm turning down cremations unless its people that have prepaid them or people I know," he said. "Cremations are one month out here in Brooklyn. I don't want to be storing bodies here that long."

A cremation oven broke down because of the volume

Richard Moylan, president of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, started as a grass cutter in 1972. Now he's closing in on five decades there.

"The volume of burials for us all at one time is overwhelming," he said. "The volume of cremations is something we've never seen."

Cremations at Green-Wood have jumped from as many as 70 to 130 per week, Moyland said. Burials more than doubled to a dozen each day.

"And if we had the capacity we would be doing more," he said of cremations.

"People are sending bodies out of state, out of the city. We're booked through the middle of May when six weeks ago you could just call up and say, 'I'm coming in tomorrow or, even sometimes, I'm coming in an hour.' Now, sadly, you need an appointment."

Except for burials, cremations and custodial services, all other work has stopped.

"We're not doing any tree maintenance," he said. "We're not doing much lawn maintenance. We're not doing any monument preservation. It's all hands on deck."

One of five cremation chambers -- which burn up to 1,800 degrees for 18 hours a day -- broke from overuse, Moyland said.

"When we started going longer hours the chamber's brick wall basically just gave way," he said.

Moylan sometimes watches burials from his office.

"We try to keep burials as close to a traditional burial as we can," he said. "We had a Covid victim and there were our guys in Hazmat suits and the family staying on the road away from the casket. Someone said a few prayers. They got back in their cars. Then I realized there were more cars of people who didn't come out."

'He worked so hard all his life'

In Corona, Queens, Rajni Attavar and her sons celebrate Mooliya's life by telling his story. He arrived in New York in the mid-1990s from Heroor village in Karnataka, India, where he taught chemistry at a university. He managed several chain drug stores. He was a security guard and worked five years as a subway station agent.

Former NY State Governor George Pataki Says Gov. Cuomo's Nursing Home Strategy is a 'Disaster'

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (left) and former New York Gov. George Pataki                                           Kevin C. Downs & Annie Wermiel for New York Post

UPDATE:
 On May 11, 2020 the news reports in New York headlined a Cuomo switch where the Governor reversed his nursing home policy - namely, sending residents who have tested positive back to the same place:

See NBC: "We're just not going to send a person who is positive to a nursing home after a hospital visit"

I have posted several articles about the Cuomo nursing home scandal and funeral home tragedy previously (See here, here, here), and now we see this issue is getting political.

Former New York State Governor George Pataki is a Republican. Andrew Cuomo is a Democrat. It is quite possible that supporters of Andrew Cuomo will create a media moment that is based upon partisan interests. This would be a terrible mistake. Political interests need to stay away from the terrible scandals following both Cuomo and his fellow Democrat NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio (see here as well as posts about Bill's wife Chirlane McCray).

Treating the dead as trash is a human tragedy that transcends politics.

Betsy Combier, betsy.combier@gmail.com
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Cuomo’s nursing home policies amid coronavirus ‘a disaster,’ says ex-Gov. Pataki

by Carl Campanile, NY POST May 1, 2020

Former Gov. George Pataki slammed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home policies during the coronavirus pandemic as a “disaster” that may have unnecessarily caused the deaths of “thousands” of vulnerable elderly residents.

In a rare swipe at his successor Friday night, Pataki called for an independent probe “so this never happens again.”

Pataki said the state Health Department should never have issued an edict requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus virus patients into nursing home facilities filled with sick, elderly patients — the population most at risk from the killer COVID-19 bug.

Compounding the misguided policy, Pataki said, is that the nursing homes lacked the personal protective equipment or testing capability to isolate and contain the spread of COVID-19.

Pataki also said he was dumbfounded as to why infected patients were sent to nursing homes instead of “hundreds of unused beds” at the two temporary hospitals at the Javits Center and the Navy’s USNS Comfort hospital ship.

“Gov. Cuomo’s handling of the nursing homes has been a disaster,” Pataki, the former-three term governor, told The Post.

“Thousands of people's lives might not have been lost except for these tragic policies.”

Pataki, a Republican who served between 1995 and 2006 said, “Everybody knew that the most vulnerable population was senior citizens. And the most vulnerable senior citizens are in nursing homes.”

Pataki said the nursing homes didn’t have adequate personal protective equipment to protect their existing staff and patients.

“To compound the problem, the state-required nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients. Anyone should have known this would be a problem — to require nursing homes to take in coronavirus patients,” he said.

He also rapped Cuomo for saying “it’s not our job” to provide masks and gowns to nursing homes, though state officials were doing so.

“It is the executive’s job,” Pataki said.

Pataki also said the nursing homes didn’t have or were not provided with the testing needed to determine which patients or staff had the virus.

He also cited a Post report that revealed the state Health Department allowed nurses and other staff who tested positive for the coronavirus to continue treating COVID-19 patients at an upstate nursing home. Following the report, the department said it implemented a new policy restricting COVID-positive staff from returning to work for 14 days.

“Any way you look at it …This is inexcusable. There’s no defense for this,” Pataki said of the policies.

He mentioned Cuomo has become one of the “most popular politicians in America” because of his press briefings on COVID-19.

Still, “it’s not about the appearance but the function of the office,” Pataki said. “The buck stops with the executive office.”

Pataki later went on Fox News and called Cuomo’s policies “incomprehensible” and a “disgrace.”

Cuomo’s senior adviser Rich Azzopardi returned fire, calling Pataki’s attacks a “sad, sad bid for relevancy.”

“It is sad and unfortunate that his star has fallen so much that he’s willing to go on TV and misrepresent the state policy,” which is based on US Centers for Disease Control guidelines, Azzopardi said.

Azzopardi reiterated prior statements from the governor that the nursing homes can only accept coronavirus patients if they have a safe facility with proper staffing and protective equipment.

Cuomo officials also parried widespread complaints of inadequate PPE, saying the state delivered 2 million pieces of protective equipment to nursing homes.

He also said federal policy restricted patients sent to the Comfort hospital.

“George Pataki doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He hasn’t had a clue in 20 years,” Azzopardi said.

Cuomo and Pataki have a complicated relationship.

Pataki defeated former three-term governor Mario Cuomo — Andrew’s dad — to become the state’s chief executive, in 1994.

Andrew Cuomo came under fire during his first bid for governor in 2002 when he said then-Gov. Pataki would just “hold the coat” of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in terms of leadership following the Sept. 11 attacks. He later abandoned his campaign before the Democratic primary.

But when Cuomo did win the governorship nearly a decade later, he appointed Pataki to serve and co-chair  on a panel that recommended tax cuts. Pataki has generally refrained from second-guessing Cuomo’s actions.

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

I love New York City.

Aside from five years living in Cairo Egypt and a couple of years in Bologna Italy, London England, Washington D.C. and Canada, NYC has been my home.

But there are people in politics here who are simply, in my opinion, out of line. One most certainly is Governor Andrew Cuomo and another is NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. Their actions on the coronavirus and the deaths from this virus are reprehensible. The dead are treated like trash.

This nursing home disaster is on you, Gov. Cuomo: Goodwin

Michael Goodwin, NY POST, May 5, 2020
There must be a better way.

A tearful Tamisha Covington looks for answers on the whereabouts of the body of
her beloved mother, Deborah Harris.

Paul Martinka

By Georgett Roberts and Bruce Golding, NY POST, April 30, 2020

Grieving families outraged over NYC funeral home body-storage scandal

BODIES PILE UP OUTSIDE FLATLANDS FUNERAL HOME, DISTURBED RESIDENTS SAY

OP-ED: ‘PERFECT STORM’ IN NURSING HOMES SHOWS NEED FOR STRONGER OVERSIGHT    By Justin Brannan & Mark Treyger, Brooklyn Paper, May 11, 2020

Betsy Combier, betsy.combier@gmail.com
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Coronavirus: New York funeral home puts corpses in lorries

BBC, April 30, 2020

Dozens of bodies have been found stored in moving lorries in New York, authorities say, after passersby complained of the smell.

The Andrew T Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn had rented trucks and put about 50 corpses inside with ice.

One official quoted anonymously in the New York Times said the home's freezer had stopped working.

Police were called to the scene and sealed off the area. A refrigerated truck later arrived.

Workers in protective suits were later seen moving bodies.

It is unclear if these were victims of the coronavirus. But officials and funeral homes have struggled to cope with the huge numbers of dead in New York, the worst-affected state in the US.

More than 18,000 people have died in New York City alone, according to Johns Hopkins University data. As a whole, the US has more than one million confirmed cases of coronavirus, more than any other country.

"They had dead bodies in the vans and trucks," the owner of the building next door told the New York Times. "They were on top of each other in body bags... all of [the vehicles] were packed."

Eric Adams, the Borough President of Brooklyn, went to the scene after the funeral home complaint emerged.

"While this situation is under investigation, we should not have what we have right now, with trucks lining the streets filled with bodies," he later told the New York Daily News.

Mr. Adams said they were alerted by "people who walked by who saw some leakage and detected an odor coming from a truck."

By law, funeral directors must keep bodies in safe conditions that prevent infection before they are buried or cremated. The home has since been cited by health officials.

In separate news, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio apologized after criticizing a gathering at a Jewish funeral - comments some said were anti-Semitic.

Mourners had gathered in large numbers to mourn the passing of a rabbi in Williamsburg.

"If in my passion and in my emotion I said something that was hurtful, I'm sorry about that," Mr de Blasio said.

"I have no regrets about calling out this danger and saying we're going to deal with it very, very aggressively."

From Betsy Combier:

Other posts on this death=trash subject:

Gov. Cuomo says ‘it’s not our job’ to provide PPE to nursing homes

By Bernadette Hogan, Carl Campanile and Bruce Golding, NY POST, April 22, 2020

Gov. Andrew Cuomo insisted that “it’s not our job” to provide coronavirus-ravaged nursing homes with personal protective equipment — even as more than 3,000 patients have lost their lives in facilities ordered by his administration to take in COVID-19 patients.

“We have been helping them with more PPE but, again, it’s not our job,” Cuomo said Wednesday during his daily briefing in Albany.

Pressed on why coronavirus patients were not kept out of the facilities, which treat the elderly and other vulnerable populations, Cuomo insisted that the state-regulated, but did not “run,” New York’s privately owned nursing homes.

“You’ll be out of business if you’re not providing your staff with the right equipment. You’re out of business. That we can do,” he said of state regulations.

Nursing homes, Cuomo said, “have to do the job they’re getting paid to do, and if they’re not doing the job they’re getting paid to do, and they’re violating state regulations, then that’s a different issue — then they should lose their license.”

But Cuomo’s insistence that his Health Department adequately regulates nursing homes was immediately contradicted by his own blunt assessment that “if somebody says to me, ‘Should I put my mother in a nursing home now?’ Now is not the best time to put your mother in a nursing home.”

As of Tuesday, COVID-19 had killed at least 3,505 residents of New York state nursing homes and adult care facilities — almost one-quarter of the state’s death toll of 15,302, according to Health Department data. And officials have warned that tally of nursing home fatalities is likely an undercount.

Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill Health Center has reported the most deaths from the pandemic of any nursing home in the state with 55 fatalities, according to the statistics.

Cuomo’s “not our job” remark came little more than a month after he told lawmakers to “Do your job” and show up in Albany for budget negotiations.

And it followed weeks of statements from Cuomo about the importance of protecting older people and those with compromised immune systems from the pandemic.

“Those are the people who are going to be vulnerable to the mortality of this disease,” Cuomo said on March 24. “It’s lives, it’s grandmothers and grandfathers and sisters and brothers.”

Cuomo’s health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, on Wednesday defended the state’s policy of requiring nursing homes to re-admit residents who’ve tested positive for the coronavirus — and also not deny admission to new residents with the disease.

“We are working very closely with the leadership of the nursing homes, both to get more staff to help them out [and] obviously, the supplies, we’ve been working very hard on that,” Zucker said.

The head of the state’s nursing-home industry group, Stephen Hanse, blamed the admission policy for bringing the coronavirus into some homes — where the governor has acknowledged that it spreads “like fire in dry grass.”

“This prevented them from safeguarding their residents and staff,” said Hanse, CEO of the New York State Health Facilities Association.

Hanse added that shortages of protective masks, gloves and gowns were helping fuel the crisis.

Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens) said he found Cuomo’s comments “infuriating.”

“The buck stops with him. But he’s saying the buck doesn’t stop with him,” Kim said.

“We gave him the authority to save lives and he’s not.”

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams accused Cuomo of “unacceptable lapses in leadership” after assuming “unprecedented power to address this public health crisis, causing him to enjoy an 87 percent approval rating and national fame.”

“Instead of accountability for errors, so we can learn and move forward, he instead says protecting the people who he knows are most vulnerable — who are losing their lives in unsafe conditions — is not his job,” Williams said.

Marie Marsala, whose 54-year-old daughter has multiple sclerosis and lives in a Long Island nursing home, said she was “very angry” at Cuomo.

“It’s his job to protect the people who are compromised,” said Marsala, 78, of Smithtown.

“He governs all of us, so he has to govern according to the needs of the people — and the people in the nursing homes need to be treated in a way that they’re not put in jeopardy.”

State officials wouldn’t detail how much protective gear they’ve given nursing homes, but City Hall said it is boosting its weekly deliveries to both public and private facilities by 50 percent.

Last week’s shipment included 40,000 N95 face masks, 800,000 surgical masks, 1.5 million disposable gloves and 105,000 gowns and coveralls, mayoral spokeswoman Avery Cohen said.

The city has also deployed 210 clinical staffers to various nursing homes and plans to at least double that number, Cohen said.

During Wednesday’s online meeting of the City Council, Speaker Corey Johnson (D-Manhattan) said he favored having “other places for isolation outside of the nursing home setting” for residents with the coronavirus, to prevent the introduction of the deadly disease “if it is not already there.”

“So we need to set up dormitories or hotels that could just be for people who were in nursing homes where we could still provide the medical services and attention that would be needed,” he said.

City Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn) demanded that surplus hospital beds be used to help alleviate the crisis.

“Saying you have these empty beds that everyone keeps talking about and meanwhile have nursing home residents who are dying, getting sick and severe staff shortage inside many nursing homes,” he asked. “Why not transport sick nursing home residents there?

Additional reporting by Gabrielle Fonrouge, Julia Marsh and Rich Calder

Coronavirus patients are being readmitted to nursing homes in New York after testing positive despite risks of spreading infection – and Governor Cuomo didn’t know

National Public Voice April 21, 2020

New York State Outrage: Governor Andrew Cuomo Did Not Know His State's Nursing Home Policy

Coronavirus has ravaged NYC nursing homes at a startling rate

NY POST, April 17, 2020

How USNS Comfort went from a symbol of hope with the president's blessing to heading back from NYC having treated fewer than 180 patients

by Ashley Collman, New York Times Business InsiderApril 23, 2020

The fix is obviously in on Cuomo’s ‘investigation’ of nursing-home horrors

POST Editorial Board April 24, 2020

New York refused to send nursing homes COVID-19 patients to nearly empty USNS Comfort

by Bernadette Hogan, Carl Campanile, and Bruce Golding NY POST, April 24, 2020 

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

Andrew Cuomo Blames Nursing Homes’ Greed for Not Rejecting Coronavirus Patients State Made Them Accept

Breitbart,

JOEL B. POLLAK

27 Apr 2020

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested Monday that “money” was partly to blame for nursing homes failing to turn away coronavirus patients that they could not care for — after a state directive requiring them to take those patients.

Cuomo has come under increasing criticism for a March 25 directive requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients. The directive read, in part (original emphasis): “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

The policy is being scrutinized more closely as some 25% of the state’s fatalities from coronavirus have occurred in nursing homes.

ritics argue that the state should not have put coronavirus patients in facilities housing the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to the illness. New Jersey and California have similar policies.

Cuomo has insisted that it is the nursing homes’ responsibility to refer patients to the state department of health, or to other facilities if they cannot care for those patients.

He reiterated that argument on Monday, and also took issue with a story in the New York Post about a nursing home in Brooklyn, the Cobble Hill Health Center, which told the state in early April that it could not handle coronavirus patients, but was refused permission to transfer them to facilities at the Jacob Javits Center or the USNS Comfort, both set up by the federal government.

The Post reported:

The CEO of a hard-hit Brooklyn nursing home, where 55 patients have died from the coronavirus, told The Post last week that he’d been warning state Health Department officials for weeks he had staffing and equipment issues — yet received little help.

“There is no way for us to prevent the spread under these conditions,’’ the head of the Cobble Hill Health Center, Donny Tuchman, wrote in an e-mail to the department on April 8.

He said he asked to move some patients to the makeshift wards at Manhattan’s Javits Center and aboard the city-docked USNS Comfort amid the pandemic, only to be told those two spots were receiving only patients from hospitals.

“I made specific requests to transfer patients, and it didn’t happen,’’ Tuchman told The Post. “There weren’t options.”

Gov. Cuomo called the story “a bit misleading,” saying: “The Comfort is a federal facility, it doesn’t take transfers from nursing homes, it only takes transfers from hospitals. That’s why the Comfort wouldn’t take a transfer from a nursing home. Because the specific protocol on that specific ship said that people have to come from a hospital.”

He added: “You can’t refer from the nursing home to the Comfort. You can’t refer to a nursing home to the Marriott Hotel, you can’t refer to the Hilton. Yeah, I know. But that nursing home can call any other facility, or can call the Department of Health, and the Department of Health will take that person and find a facility.”

Cuomo added: “Who cares about just that ship, if the point is that nursing home should have referred that patient, and should have told the Department of Health, ‘I can’t handle these patients.'”

He added that nursing homes knew they could lose “money” if they rejected patients, so they had an incentive to take coronavirus patients even if they could not care for them without endangering other patients.

“Whatever reason they want, they call the Department of Health, and say, ‘You take Bernadette. I can’t handle her. And the Department of Health takes [her]. Now, when the Department of Health takes Bernadette, they no longer get paid for Bernadette. Oh! Money.”

Cuomo said that nursing homes were allowed to transfer coronavirus patients back to hospitals if they themselves could not care for them, but he claimed that there were no cases in which nursing homes had done so.

Asked whether nursing homes feared scrutiny from state regulators if they rejected coronavirus patients, Cuomo said that the reality was contrary: that nursing homes that could not provide adequate care faced “scrutiny if they don’t do that.”

The governor was later asked whether he was saying that nursing homes cared for profits more than for patients’ welfare.

“No. Not at all,” Cuomo said.

He also said that the state had several COVID-only facilities that were available as alternatives.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.