William Walter Kay BA LL B
On March 25,
2020 New York State’s Health Department issued the urgent Advisory: Hospital Discharges and Admissions to
Nursing Homes. Nursing Home
(NH) Administrators, Directors of Nursing, and Hospital Discharge Planners needed
to “carefully review this guidance.”
To “clarify expectations” regarding nursing
home acceptance of residents returning from hospital and nursing home
acceptance of new admissions, the Advisory orders:
“…NHs must comply with the expedited receipt of residents from hospitals to NHs.”
Hospital
Administrators are given discretion over assessing patient fitness for transit
and over choosing which patients to send. Thereafter:
“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of Covid-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for Covid-19 prior to admission or re-admission.”
Withering
denunciations of this Advisory appeared instantly. A March
29, 2020 joint statement (Society for Post-Acute and Long-term Care
Medicine; American Health Care Association; and National Center for Assisted
Living) references the then ongoing Covid-19 outbreak at a Washington nursing
home which killed 40 and sent half the residents to emergency wards.
The joint
statement also relays CDC data indicating that, within geriatric facilities,
Covid-19’s case-to-fatality rate exceeds 15%.
The statement
further cites a March 27, 2020 CDC finding that 57% of Covid-19-positive
nursing home residents remained asymptomatic for up to a week. During this
incubatory period such residents: “have potential
for substantial viral shedding.”
The authors
rejected the re-purposing of New York’s nursing homes into frontline
quarantines. New York nursing homes were already encountering critical
shortages, or complete depletions, of personal protective equipment (PPE).
Staffing shortages were exacerbated by Covid-19 outbreaks among workers and by
school closures which threw many into childcare crises. Poorly trained workers
were doing shifts at multiple homes.
NHs run out of
old, crowded buildings with narrow corridors and antiquated ventilation are
incapable of infection control. Having struggled financially for decades, many
homes were in no position to suddenly become hospital overflow wards.
The pretext for
the hospital-to-NH transfers was a ginned-up shortage of hospital space. In any
event, sending Covid-19 patients away from hospitals to free-up hospital space
for Covid-19 patients is illogical. Moreover, planting contagious patients into
crowded seniors’ homes could only sow a bumper crop of Covid-19 cases. The
statement’s authors conclude that the March 25 Advisory: “will only add to the surge in Covid-19 patients that require hospital
care.”
The remedy these
healthcare specialists proposed has been endorsed by China’s Xi and by
America’s Commander-in-Chief, namely: large field hospitals.
On Trump’s order
the Army set-up a 2,910-bed hospital in New York’s Javits
Center. Trump also docked the 1,000-bed USNS
Comfort in New York. Both facilities were operational late March to May 1.
Both were shunned by NY Health. The Javits Center saw under 1,000 patients and
never had more than 500 occupied beds. Comfort saw 182 patients.
Between March 25
and the Advisory’s May 10 reversal 4,500 New York
Covid-19 cases were transferred from hospitals to nursing homes. Trump’s
field hospital plan could have intercepted and quarantined all transfers.
Cuomo’s team
fanned the myth of overwhelmed hospitals in late March; and they ghosted
alternative quarantine venues throughout April. With eyes wide open they
dispatched a hundred or so Covid-19 cases per day into nursing homes. During
this 45-day process Covid-19-positive nursing home staff worked at multiple
nursing homes without PPE.
Although he will
be lynched for this atrocity, the brick-headed, celebrity-tipsy Cuomo is not
our arch-villain; that spot is taken by 60-year-old Bronx-native, Howard Zucker.
The romance of
the Plague Doctor
swept young Howard from his initial path, anesthesiology. Once the highest
ranking American in W.H.O., Zucker participated in emergency responses to SARS,
anthrax, Aids, Ebola, Zika, measles, and legionella. Zucker’s sophistry-laden Tedx plea for government
control of the internet references H1N1 and Norovirus. Regarding the latter he
quips:
“The rapid spread of Norovirus on a cruise
ship is a constant reminder of the dangers of being held captive to a virus.”
Zucker helped
develop the Medical Reserve Corps. Zucker teaches Bio-Security Law at
Georgetown U. As New York State’s Health Commissioner Zucker: “oversees the entire health care workforce as
well as health care facilities, including hospitals, long-term care and nursing
homes.”
When did Zucker
start bio-bombing nursing homes? His Advisory’s “clarify expectations”
phrase implies some nursing homes must have resisted Covid-19 transfers
pre-March 25. Hospital-to-NH Covid-19 transfers likely began March 18ish;
scaling-up post-March 25. (New York State’s Covid-19 death count rose from 46
on March 19 to 284 by March 24.)
Frankenstein
reared his monstrous head mid-April as nursing home body-counts soared past
expectations. Hitherto NY Health authorities inflated death tallies and kept
mum on nursing homes. Now they scramble to shrink their nursing home
body-count.
At 11:46 AM,
April 15, all 613 New York nursing home operators received an email ordering
them to phone into a 1 PM conference call with Zucker. No paper trail this
time. (A
2-minute recording survives). Operators were told to scour their files and
prepare separate lists of tested, and presumed, Covid-19 fatalities along with
data regarding average fatalities. Operators were to exclude from their lists
any deceased resident not physically in the nursing home at the time of death.
Under Zucker’s
system a long-time nursing home resident could contract Covid-19 at that
nursing home and die within hours of being rushed to hospital – and not be
counted as a nursing home Covid-19 fatality. New York is the only jurisdiction
resorting to such desperate legerdemain. Zucker’s team is also free to doctor
earlier, untested nursing home deaths into something other than Covid-19
fatalities.
The official NY
nursing home death tally of 5,900 is a naked fraud. Local
journalists have given voice to nursing home staff who swear recent deaths
in their homes are several times higher than what appears in government
reports.
New York’s
official nursing home death tally is 20% of New York’s total (29,009) Covid-19
death tally. This is the best nursing home fatality rate in the world. Imagine
a place with a hundred individual nursing homes each reporting more Covid-19
deaths than the City of San Francisco turning out to be the paragon of
geriatric hygiene.
In 14 US and several
European jurisdictions nursing home residents make-up over 50%
of Covid-19 fatalities. Several jurisdictions have NH-to-total fatality
rates of 80% including entire countries, like Canada.
In Quebec,
which imposed policies similar to New York’s, almost 90% of Covid-19 fatalities
are nursing home residents. When the truth comes out New York’s Covid-19
nursing home fatalities will settle at a believable 70-to-90% of total
fatalities.
New York State’s
nursing home body-count must already exceed 20,000.
On March 15,
2020 New York nursing homes housed 101,518 New Yorkers. Ten weeks later a fifth
of those folk lay dead. There will be absolute hell to pay when the citizens of
Gotham awaken to this crime.
See Also
Local New York Area Investigative Reporting
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