Coronavirus has killed nursing home residents at an alarming rate, yet state officials kept public in the dark

Coronavirus has been silently ravaging nursing homes and adult care facilities across New York State, killing residents at an alarming rate — which, until this week, has largely been shielded from the public by state and local officials.

Since the state finally began releasing nursing home fatality data on Tuesday, it’s been revealed that the virus has taken the lives of more residents in New York’s nursing homes and adult care facilities than the total number of lives lost in any other state. 

As of April 14, more than 3,000 nursing home and adult care residents in New York have died of the coronavirus disease. For context, New Jersey, the state with the second-highest number of fatalities from the virus, has had 2,805 deaths — in total. 

The situation is especially grim in Suffolk County, where more than half of the county’s 653 coronavirus fatalities — 334 people— have been residents in nursing homes and adult care facilities.

The governor and state health commissioner would have us believe this dreadful result was inevitable. They talk about the medically frail conditions of nursing home residents, how it’s a closed environment, how once the virus gets inside, it’s “like an ember in dry grass.”

Certainly, long-term care facilities are high-risk settings. But was this carnage truly inevitable?

The first known nursing home resident known to have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. was a 73-year-old female resident of the Life Care Center in Kirkland Washington, who died March 2. An investigation by the Seattle Times revealed that a respiratory illness outbreak inside the Kirkland facility was observed by facility officials beginning in mid-February. 

Even after they understood what they were dealing with — a deadly coronavirus outbreak — the Kirkland nursing home didn’t obtain enough supplies to test all residents until March 7, and it took another week to test most employees, according to the Times. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a March 18 report said limited access to testing, a lack of protective equipment and staff working at multiple facilities while sick all contributed to the spread of the disease at Life Care Center.

Did New York learn from the Kirkland, Washington tragedy?

Did New York take steps to make sure nursing homes had the PPE they would surely need as the pandemic spread? Did it ensure nursing homes were testing their staff members? Did it take steps to enhance infection control at these facilities?

According to two residents with relatives in two different Suffolk nursing homes, the nursing homes said they were directed by the state health department to admit COVID patients from overburdened and overcrowded area hospitals. If true, the state may have dropped a lit match — never mind an ember — into dry grass and then fanned the flame.

Here in New York, the first reported COVID-19 deaths were on March 14. Both were elderly people with “underlying health conditions.” We don’t know if they were nursing home residents. In fact, we don’t even know when the first nursing home deaths occurred in New York, because the state did not report nursing home fatalities separately — on a county level — until this week. Instead, the state health department sat on this information until Tuesday — one full month after the first reported COVID death here. On Tuesday, the state finally released county-level data on nursing home fatalities.

But New York has refused to release the fatality data for individual nursing homes. The state health commissioner first claimed the federal health care privacy law prevented the disclosure, but after being called out on that false claim, then vaguely cited “privacy” concerns. The governor said “it is a law,” though he couldn’t cite the statute.

Today at his news briefing, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state is gathering the data on individual nursing homes and adult care facilities and will release the information later today.

Without government disclosure of infections and deaths at individual nursing home and adult care facilities, family members who are worried about their loved ones must rely on information provided by the care facilities themselves — facilities which have every interest in suppressing the information.