The administration has been recording the location of nursing home deaths attributed to COVID-19 since at least April 2020, according to a Department of Health document obtained by Fox News.
"A new field has been added under the CURRENT Resident Death Details section of the form," read a portion of the form, which was reportedly updated on April 19 of last year. "The new field will collect the resident's Place of Death and is required for all resident deaths you are reporting in that section."
Despite the reported tracking of nursing home deaths, administration officials claimed the death tolls could not be verified.
"The out-of-facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified — this did not change the conclusion of the report, which was and is that the March 25 order was 'not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities,'" Beth Garvey, a special counsel and adviser to the governor, stated.
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Gary Holmes, a spokesman for the New York Department of Health, pointed out that the reports the department received had certain details omitted to protect patient confidentiality.
“The Department of Health has received HERDS information daily from more than 1,000 long term care facilities and more than 200 hospitals since the start of this pandemic. In April 2020 we asked for additional information to provide a more specific clinical picture, and as part of that correspondence we asked all facilities to provide that same level of information retrospectively to March 1. All HERDS data sets, specific to fatalities, included only initials and age to protect patient privacy," he said in an email to the Washington Examiner. "Additionally, the Department receives SPARCS ... data from hospitals, which often comes on a lag. ... While that information does include name and date of birth, it does not specify the name of a long term care facility from which a patient was transferred. The Department spent months reconciling the information received ... in order to understand and report accurate fatality data from multiple sources."
Cuomo signed a controversial executive order on March 25, 2020, shielding nursing homes from liability when admitting COVID-19-positive patients. A report conducted by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a government watchdog group, found Cuomo's directive was linked to over 1,000 additional resident deaths.
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"Statewide, the findings imply that COVID-positive new admissions between late March and early May, which numbered 6,327, were associated with several hundred and possibly more than 1,000 additional resident deaths," the report read.
Cuomo reversed the nursing home policy on May 10, 2020.
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Administration officials conceded they underreported death counts due to political pressure.
"Basically, we froze," Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, told state lawmakers in February, explaining the administration undercounted deaths out of fear of political retribution by former President Donald Trump.
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