EDITORIAL

'Who Cares?' Asks Cuomo,

But COVID-19 Answers Needed

We’ve seen it happen here.

On Dec. 28, Cooperstown Center – the former Otsego Manor, now in private hands – advised its Family Council that two residents had died – not necessarily OF COVID, but WITH COVID.

Officially, one died of a bleeding hernia, the other of sepsis, at Bassett Hospital, NOT at the nursing home.

The Cuomo Administration’s Health Department took this kind of parsing a step further: Statewide, if a nursing home resident with COVID was transferred to a hospital and died there, he or she was counted as a hospital death, not a nursing-home death.

Attorney General Letitia James blew the whistle on this slack practice in a press conference last Thursday, Jan. 28, detailing an investigation that found nursing-home deaths from COVID may actually be 50 percent higher than the Cuomo Administration has been letting on.

Later that day, state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker released new numbers, raising the nursing-home tally by 3,800 to a new total of 12,743. That means about a third of our state’s 40,000 COVID deaths happened in places like Cooperstown Center.

So Cuomo and his health commissioner, Howard Zucker, knew. But so what?

Here’s what.