How many grandmas and grandpas did the DNC convention speaker and notorious White House aspirant really kill?
Governor Cuomo doesn’t want to talk about it. Whenever anyone asks him about nursing home deaths, he insists that it’s political. And sure, the New York Post, FOX News, and I’ve been writing about it.
But so has the New York Daily News and now the Associated Press.
Riverdale Nursing Home in the Bronx appears, on paper, to have escaped the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, with an official state count of just four deaths in its 146-bed facility.
The truth, according to the home, is far worse: 21 dead, most transported to hospitals before they succumbed.
At issue is New York’s insistence on not counting the deaths of nursing home residents conveyed to a hospital before their deaths.
That statistic could add thousands to the state’s official care home death toll of just over 6,600. But so far the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to divulge the number, leading to speculation the state is manipulating the figures to make it appear it is doing better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire.
How much bigger are the actual numbers? The AP has some thoughts and extrapolations.
According to the federal data, roughly a fifth of the state’s homes reported resident deaths from early June to mid July — a tally of 323 dead, 65 percent higher than the state’s count of 195 during that time period.
Even if half that undercount had held true from the start of the pandemic, that would translate into thousands more nursing home resident deaths than the state has acknowledged.
Another group of numbers also suggests an undercount. State health department surveys show 21,000 nursing home beds are lying empty this year, 13,000 more than expected — an increase of almost double the official state nursing home death tally. While some of that increase can be attributed to fewer new admissions and people pulling their loved ones out, it suggests that many others who aren’t there anymore died.
Don’t expect CNN, the Washington Post or the New York Times, explicitly partisan outlets that operate to boost Democrats and attack Republicans, to cover this. It’s why Cuomo is a listed DNC convention speaker and why Politico praised Murphy’s mismanagement of New Jersey as a model, and why Wolf in Pennsylvania is being cheered. This is the greatest whitewashing of mass deaths in recent American history and Republicans have failed to get on board and keep pushing this issue. That’s tragic.
Leave a Reply