New York’s top prosecutor’s investigations into allegations of patient neglect at nursing homes during the pandemic has found a larger number of nursing home residents died from coronavirus than the State Health Department has previously claimed, perhaps understated by as much as 50 percent. The bombshell report released yesterday found nursing homes lacked compliance with COVID protocols and put residents at increased risk. Attorney General Letitia James says at least 4,000 residents died after the state issued a controversial mandate at the end of March forcing nursing homes to admit “medically stable” coronavirus patients. Stony Point and Orange County assemblyman Colin Schmitt says it’s taken too long for the governor to come clean on what happened…
In the report, James suggests eliminating the immunity provisions for health care providers enacted earlier this year by the governor. In a statement released late yesterday afternoon, State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said they’ve always reported the number of fatalities within hospitals regardless of the patient’s residence, and separately reported the number of fatalities within nursing home facilities, and so the figures are similar to the numbers the attorney general came up with.
COVID-19 by the numbers now, here in Rockland, we lost two more to COVID, the total is 835. We’ve got 71 hospitalized confirmed with coronavirus, and 2,641 active cases. Our total case count is 33,995, that’s 226 more than Thursday.