A group of state Senate Democrats – fed up with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s treatment of nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic – advanced bills on Tuesday that would bolster accountability and oversight of the facilities and of the state health department.
The legislative body’s health committee move to pass the bills for a full Senate vote comes amid a state nursing home crisis that killed nearly 15,000 residents of the disease and coaxed both Cuomo and health commissioner Howard Zucker because they tried to keep that song for the public.
Cuomo’s critics blame his administration for causing deaths by forcing residents of nursing homes admitted with COVID-19 to return to the vulnerable facilities amid a shortage of hospital beds – and then for underreporting fatalities from the coronavirus associated with the long-term care centers.
State Senator Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx), chair of the Health Committee, accused the Democratic governor on Tuesday of “ holding back ” the state legislature for months by refusing to release full figures on the number of nursing home residents who died of the coronavirus.
Rivera said Cuomo and state commissioner Howard Zucker were on the data – until Attorney General Letitia James released a damning report late last month accusing the administration of misleading the public by under-counting the death toll by 50 percent.
“As we suspected and feared, the second floor had held us back,” Rivera said during a virtual public committee meeting on the bills, referring to the governor’s office on the second floor in the State Capitol building in Albany.
The health department, when reporting deaths in nursing homes, included only the approximately 8,700 residents at the time who died in long-term care facilities, not those who had succumbed to the virus in hospitals.
Hours after the release of the attorney general’s report, Zucker began to clean up by revealing that at least 4,000 more nursing home residents had died of COVID-19 in hospitals.
Last week, an Albany judge even ripped off the Cuomo-Zucker Health Department in a ruling over not providing nursing home deaths to a government watchdog group.
One of the Senate bills under review Tuesday and sponsored by Rivera would require the health department to report on the deaths of all nursing home residents, including those “who were transferred to a hospital and died in the hospital. “.
The bill, if signed into law, would apply retroactively to March 1, 2020, as the pandemic started in the US.
“To make good policy, you need to have good information … so we can prevent unnecessary deaths,” Rivera said.
Republican state lawmakers hopped on the Cuomo bashing cart.
“For the families of those who have lost loved ones in nursing homes, please know that today is one more step towards accountability, but the road is far from over,” said Rob Ortt, Senate majority leader. from Lockport.
He and other GOPers are pushing for an investigation into the state’s actions by the federal Justice Department.
“The legislature should hold bipartisan hearings, using subpoenas, and the Justice Department should expand its efforts to investigate what has happened here,” said Will Barclay, minority leader in the state assembly, Will Barclay of Syracuse.
Cuomo spokesman Gary Holmes responded in an email to The Post: “We said we would release additional data once our audit was complete and before the Commissioner’s budget statement. Let’s do that. ”
“While the AG report rightly pointed out the department’s efforts to support personnel, testing, PPE and inspections, the data was recorded incorrectly, so we released what was checked at the time to correct the record.”