When Justice Disappears

Yesterday The Epoch Times posted an article about the investigation into coronavirus deaths in nursing homes in any of the states run by Democrat governors. It’s interesting that it’s the Democrat governors who sent the elderly coronavirus patients into nursing homes.

The article reports:

The U.S. Department of Justice has opted against investigating any of the Democrat governors who last year ordered nursing homes to accept residents who tested positive for COVID-19 against the recommendations of health groups.

Federal officials reviewed information they received from New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey last year regarding the orders.

Based on the review, they’re not opening Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) investigations in the first three states, Joe Gaeta, deputy assistant attorney general, told Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) in a letter on Friday.

The act enables the attorney general to launch a case in court against a state or local government, or its employees or agents, when officials suspect or find that people in institutions owned or run by such a government have had their rights denied.

The article continues:

The CDC issued guidance in March 2020, before the orders were released, saying COVID-positive patients could be released from healthcare facilities to long-term care facilities but if that happened, the facilities should be equipped with “adequate personal protective equipment supplies and an ability to adhere to infection prevention and control recommendations for the care of COVID-19 patients.”

“Preferably, the patient would be placed at a facility that has already cared for COVID-19 cases, in a specific unit designated to care for COVID-19 residents,” the guidance stated.

The orders in question were imposed by Cuomo and the others early in the COVID-19 pandemic. They informed nursing home operators that they could not turn away residents solely on the basis of a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.

Health groups like The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine warned against the orders, stating in a resolution in March 2020 that “admitting patients with suspected or documented COVID-19 infection represents a clear and present danger to all of the residents of a nursing home.”

Large percentages of deaths pinned to COVID-19 in the four states took place among nursing homes.

We no longer have equal justice under the law in America.

This Needs To Be Investigated In All States Where The Policy Was Put In Place

Just the News is reporting the following today:

A Michigan county prosecutor on Thursday laid out his effort to review Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s policies on COVID health-safety policies on nursing homes, in response to a high number of deaths in such facilities over roughly the past year.

An estimated 5,537 people have died in long-term care facilities in the state since the pandemic started about a year ago, which is about 35 percent of all COVID-related deaths in Michigan over that time period. 

Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido said he’s effectively reviving a roughly 68-year-old review board, formed to protect children, to look into Whitmer’s policies.

Good governance is a matter of life and death. That has been proven in the past year–Florida probably has one of the highest elderly populations in the country and yet managed the virus very well. They protected the elderly and pretty much let the rest of the population go on with their business. Many of the states led by Democrats locked down their states but sent coronavirus patients into nursing homes where the most vulnerable residents of their state lived.

The article notes:

Lucido, following up on statements Monday calling on residents to ask for medical records of family members who died in a nursing home, then file a police report. He said Thursday that residents should give local law enforcement such information as when and where the death occurred. He also said the name of the attending physician should be included.

He said earlier that his efforts have been slowed by such records are protected under so-called HIPAA laws that protect patient information.

Whitmer said amid complaints that her administration has not been forthcoming with data related to virus deaths in nursing homes told a local TV station: “I’m proud of the work that we did. We can parse through different angles of statistics and compare ourselves with other states but … I think that it sometimes can be a fool’s errand because the way that we are congregating data varies from state to state. When there’s never a national strategy, (it’s) hard to really compare apples to apples.”

It is possible that the Governors in the states that sent coronavirus patients into nursing homes did not understand the risk. However, when the risk became apparent, the policies should have been quickly changed. Governor’s who did not change their policy after it became obvious what was happening need to be removed from office.

The Real Numbers From New York

The New York Post posted an article today about the actual number of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes in the state.

The article reports:

The state Department of Health quietly updated its chart of nursing-home deaths to include those who died at hospitals as well as in the facilities. The update added more than 4,000 deaths to the state tally as of Thursday.

The Upper East Side Rehabilitation and Nursing Center had 29 deaths at the home, and another 51 in a hospital.

Information for the Bronxcare Special Care Center had previously showed only eight COVID-19 deaths. But there were 20 additional deaths in the hospital, according to the new data.

At the Boropark Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare, an additional 41 people died in the hospital on top of 32 at the home.

The article notes:

The state Department of Health had refused for months to provide the information until it was forced to by a judge Thursday.

Acting Albany Supreme Court Justice Kimberly O’Connor blasted the DOH for claiming it could not produce the data, and ordered the stats released within five days. The Empire Center for Public Policy had sought the information under a Freedom of Information Law request.

State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker finally released the total number of nursing home deaths on Jan. 28, putting the figure at 12,743 with the hospital fatalities, instead of 8,740. The disclosure came after Attorney General Letitia James produced a damning report saying the number of deaths could be as much as 50 percent higher than officials claimed.

The state has been criticized for early directives that mandated ill-equipped and understaffed nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients, knowing the elderly population was most at risk for the virus.

It is obscene that the courts had to be called into action to get this data. The number of nursing home deaths in New York was covered up to protect the reputation of Governor Cuomo. Now the facts are out, and it is up to the residents of the state to decide in the next election whether he will remain Governor. It is criminal that with a hospital ship, a hospital set up in Central Park, and the Javits Center equipped to handle coronavirus patients, patients were sent into nursing homes where the most vulnerable lived.

Rewriting Recent History

Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about how Governor Cuomo handled the coronavirus in New York State.

The article reports:

New York governor Andrew Cuomo (D.) said Wednesday that the widely reported readmission of coronavirus patients to nursing homes at the height of the pandemic in the state “never happened.”

Cuomo said that despite a March 25 advisory issued by his administration barring nursing homes from denying admission to patients “solely based on a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19,” readmissions never took place. He claimed that, because the state “never needed” those nursing home beds, readmitting COVID-positive patients “just never happened.”

Cuomo admitted his administration implemented the policy but said it was only an “anticipatory rule,” in case hospitals became overwhelmed with patients.

As a result of the rule, however, nursing homes readmitted over 6,000 patients who tested positive for coronavirus between late March and early May. 

I wonder if the mainstream media will actually confront him about this lie.

The article further reports:

Nearly 6,500 New York nursing home patients have died of COVID-19 as of Sept. 28, accounting for about 20 percent of the state’s total coronavirus deaths (32,768). Some experts say that number could be higher, as the state health department does not count those who contracted the virus in a nursing home. 

In the same call, Cuomo said his policies “saved lives.” 

Governor Cuomo has taken some very interesting positions as New York has fought the coronavirus.

On April 13, 2020, NBC New York reported:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is never shy to point out that President Donald Trump attacks him more than any other governor in America.

But on Monday, Cuomo took to an unlikely venue — The Howard Stern Show — to offer genuine praise for the president’s response to the coronavirus in his home state.

“He has delivered for New York. He has,” Cuomo said of Trump, in response to a question from Stern about whether the president has really done anything of consequence to help.

“By and large it has worked,” Cuomo said of the relationship.

He cited, as he has before, the sending of the Navy ship USNS Comfort and the construction of a military field hospital at the Javits Center as examples of the president responding quickly to the state’s needs.

That’s very nice. However, on September 24, 2020, U.S. News reported:

Cuomo and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are calling for congressional investigations into the Trump administration’s “politicization of [the] pandemic response.”

The Democratic governors singled out President Donald Trump, saying in a joint statement on Thursday that the “unprecedented and unacceptable scale of this tragedy is the direct result of President Trump and the federal government’s deceit, political self-dealing and incompetence.”

Note that September is part of the run-up to the Presidential election. Also note that calling for a congressional investigation into someone after saying that your relationship with them works seems a little odd. I don’t think the President is the one who politicized the coronavirus.

Hopefully The Cover-Up Is Unraveling

Yesterday Paul Mirengoff at Power Line Blog posted an article about the investigation into the nursing home deaths in New York State that were the result of placing elderly people who had tested positive for the coronavirus in nursing homes.

The article reports:

Janice Dean reports on the weather for Fox News. She lost both of her in-laws to the Wuhan coronavirus. Both contracted the disease at long-term care facilities, but her mother in-law died at a hospital.

New York apparently does not include cases like the mother-in-law’s in totaling up the nursing home death count. Thus, New York is under counting the number of deaths that arose at such facilities.

Dean has long wanted to testify about New York state’s disastrous response to the coronavirus in nursing homes. However, she was removed from the witness list for a hearing by the legislature on this subject.

Dean says a Republican New York Senator told her the Democrat majority was “uncomfortable having [her] as a witness.” Dean believes the majority was responding to pressure from Governor Cuomo or his associates. Cuomo’s office denies the charge.

The article continues:

Because of the way New York counts coronavirus deaths (see above), no one knows how many people died from the virus after contracting it at such facilities. The Cuomo administration refuses to provide such information even though it has been requested by both Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature. Clearly, Cuomo is trying to prevent a full assessment of the carnage that resulted from his policies.

Fortunately, as I discussed here, the Trump Justice Department has sent a letter to Governor Cuomo (among other governors) seeking this information. The letter asks for:

The number of Public Nursing Home residents, employees, other staff, guests, and visitors who died of COVID-19 including those who died in a Public Nursing Home or after being transferred to a hospital or other medical facility, hospice, home care, or any other location.

(Emphasis added)

The article concludes:

The DOJ requested this information, along with three other categories of information, in order to evaluate whether to initiate investigations under the federal Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), which protects the civil rights of persons in state-run nursing homes, among others. I hope the DOJ will succeed where Janice Dean and New York state legislators from both parties have failed in prying loose information that should have made public months ago.

The Cuomo administration’s handling of the pandemic at long-term care facilities was scandalous. So are its efforts to cover up the consequences of the bungling. So are the efforts of the mainstream media — successful so far — to depict Cuomo as a hero of the pandemic.

The truth needs to come out. Hopefully it will.

Critical Thinking Takes A Vacation

The Democrat convention hit a new low last night. This is a video (from YouTube) of one of the speakers:

I am sorry that the young lady lost her father. However, her father was responsible for his own actions. It is interesting to me that she is blaming President Trump for her father’s death  She is speaking at a convention where one of the main speakers sent many elderly people with the coronavirus into nursing homes,  causing the deaths of the residents there, yet no one in her party is willing to speak about that. She is being used as a political prop.