Andrew Cuomo's Covid-19 nursing home fiasco shows the ethical perils of pandemic policymaking

[Klaralven]

WASHINGTON — The humbling of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on pandemic policy has been spectacular and swift. Within a matter of days, one of America’s most trusted voices in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic became a political pariah.

Outrage over Cuomo’s decisions — first, to require nursing homes to accept Covid-19-positive patients when New York’s hospitals were overflowing, and then, to hide data about deaths of nursing home residents — has engulfed Albany in recent weeks. Court orders, leaks, and investigations revealed that Cuomo dramatically and intentionally understated the pandemic’s toll on nursing home residents in New York.

Cuomo’s fall from grace is a cautionary tale of the perils of policymaking during a public health crisis. Making the right decisions in the early days of battling a novel virus is incredibly difficult, and leaders shouldn’t fear retribution for tough choices they made in good faith, five ethicists and public health experts told STAT. But that doesn’t absolve leaders from taking responsibility for their missteps.

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Cuomo wasn’t alone in prohibiting nursing homes from discriminating against patients based on their Covid-19 infection status — officials in other states with similar nursing home policies faced criticism, but managed to avoid career-threatening blowback.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/26/cuomos-nursing-home-fiasco-ethical-perils-pandemic-policymaking/

I believe that Gov Murphy in New Jersey also made the same disastrous blunder of putting Covid patients back into nursing homes, infecting more. Later, some nursing homes were emptied of well patients and dedicated to Covid patients.

New Jersey and New York are now only average in terms of cases per million population, but we are still number one and two in number of deaths per million population, mainly because of the tremendously high number of nursing home deaths last spring.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[onecaliberal]

1. The Florida governor is SELLING the vaccine to his wealthy donars

AND did everything possible to ALLOW the spread and death amongst everyone. But hey, let's trash focus only on democratic response. I am so fucking over this stupid bullshit.

[Klaralven]

2. In deaths/million, FL is ranked 38, only two positions worse than CA at 40.

In cases / million FL is ranked 28, two positions better than CA at 26.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Both states are vastly better than NJ and NY, even though CA was a center of early outbreaks in the Spring.

[onecaliberal]

3. We are coming out of a nasty winter spike in my county that has been devastating.

Considering California has 40 million people that is saying something.

[Dem4Life1102]

4. Both Florida and California benefit from warmer climates

where the virus doesn't thrive. They are also less densely populated for the most part which also helps to contain the spread.

[Klaralven]

5. One would think that Florida would have lots of nursing homes though

By late May, there were only 177 residents at Menlo Park, down from 300 in early March. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation shows that many of the dead were never tested for Covid-19, their official cause of death recorded as pneumonia or sepsis. Though the facility’s management maintains that the official death count from Covid-19 is 62, the investigation concluded that 101 residents had died of Covid-19 at Menlo Park since March, the highest single death rate of any nursing home in the country.

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They want accountability. They want transparency. They want justice. But in April, New Jersey passed an immunity law intended to protect nursing home owners from responsibility for Covid-19 deaths, a law that nursing home operators hope will stand in the way of what the bereaved most desire. Despite the fact that nationally more than 50,000 nursing home residents and 750 staff members have died so far from Covid-19, at least 26 states have passed some form of immunity law that shields long-term care facilities and healthcare providers from Covid-19-related civil negligence lawsuits. A recent article in ABA Journal, a publication of the American Bar Association, states: “Those measures generally bar claims for standard negligence, only allowing claims for harder-to-prove gross negligence, willful misconduct or fraud.”

Immunity laws are often passed by state and federal governments in the event of a crisis. But the decision to protect the nursing home industry, betrays legislators’ – and perhaps society’s – erroneous assumption that elders’ deaths were inevitable, that their lives were worth little or too frail to be saved. Clinicians and advocates alike have countered that proper infection control, long a systemic problem in nursing home care, could have largely mitigated the number of deaths.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/28/nursing-homes-america-new-jersey-coronavirus

[onecaliberal]

8. I live in a very red part of the state where A LOT of people NEVER masked.

I do think it could have been worse but restaurants have been closed for indoor for months and months. The people here are too fucking stupid to understand they’re prolonging it all.

[Sur Zobra]

7. Whataboutism?

Expose all the rotten ones regardless of party

[MichMan]

6. Never understood all the praise being heaped on Cuomo when NY was #1 in deaths.