Assemblyman Palumbo calls for independent investigation into New York’s nursing home deaths

North Fork Assemblyman Anthony Palumbo is calling for an independent investigation into the thousands of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes in New York State.

Palumbo questions the role of state policy in contributing to the death toll of the virus in New York’s long-term care facilities, which today stands at 5,516 residents. That’s about one-fourth of the state’s total COVID-19 deaths. In Suffolk, 719 people have died in nursing homes and adult care facilities — 43% of the total number of deaths due to the coronavirus.

“From the very beginning of this crisis we have known how deadly COVID-19 could be in these facilities and yet it appears that the state failed to provide essential PPE to nursing homes and instituted dangerous policies that resulted in countless deaths,” Palumbo said.

“There needs to be a full and independent investigation into this disaster to determine how and why our most vulnerable New Yorkers were placed in unsafe environments with deadly results,” he said.

The State Health Department on March 25 directed nursing homes to admit COVID-positive discharges from hospitals — whether or not the patient was a resident of the nursing home prior to hospitalization. That directive also prohibited nursing homes from requiring a hospitalized patient to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission, as long as the patient “medically stable.”

On Sunday, the governor signed an executive order prohibiting hospitals from discharging COVID-positive patients to nursing homes. While the order seems to walk back the March 25 directive, state officials yesterday said it did not rescind it.

“The two orders coexist,” secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa, who heads the state’s COVID crisis team, said.

Today the Department of Health’s March 25 directive had been either relocated or removed from the DOH website. The web address where it had been posted since March 25 now returns a “page not found” error.

A spokesperson for the agency today said she believed the document was still on the website but could not provide the address.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo yesterday acknowledged that, at the time of the March 25 health department directive, the state was “in a scramble to provide more hospital beds.”

State officials were at the time fearful of not having sufficient hospital capacity to handle the surge of patients expected when the coronavirus outbreak reached its peak in early- to mid-April.

“When we started this, remember, the whole question was will we have enough hospital beds… So, the last thing you’d be doing would be gratuitously saying we’re going to keep a person in a hospital bed who didn’t need a hospital bed and could be cared for in another facility,” Cuomo said. “It would be reckless and it would be negligent because we needed the hospital bed so badly,” he said.

While this directive has been partially changed, Palumbo said, the change came too late for many seniors. According to recent reports, over 5% of New York nursing home residents have been killed by the coronavirus, Palumbo said.

The governor has repeatedly stressed the need to protect the elderly from the virus, which is particularly lethal to people over age 65. He has also compared the coronavirus in a nursing home environment to a fire burning in dry grass.

“Yet our mothers and fathers were getting exposed to the virus because of the state’s order,” Palumbo said.

“State government has an obligation to get to the bottom of how things went so horribly wrong in New York’s nursing homes and what we can do to prevent these types of tragedies in the future,” Palumbo said.

The assemblyman, who is the Republican candidate for the First Senate District this year, said the State Senate can use its subpoena power to obtain documents the health department relied on in making these decisions.

“This is an obvious, easy request,” Palumbo said. “The governor says at every turn he’s basing his decisions on data and empirical evidence. I want to see what his evidence was.”

Palumbo said he is not looking to cast blame. “Now is not the time for that,” he said. “Instead, I am looking to prevent unnecessary deaths and to better protect New York’s seniors.”

The governor’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.