The Dead+Trash Scandal in New York: Nursing Homes Are Not Accurately Reporting The Number of Deaths

Another alarming story on the dead=trash in New York City: nursing homes may not be reporting the number of deaths from COVID-19 to the Department of Health.

This is a major scandal, and I'm sure that relatives of the dead who died alone and then were stacked into trucks, will sue.

The legacy of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the future political career of Governor Andrew Cuomo are going to be tarnished by this.

That's a good thing.

Cuomo Says Nursing Homes Accepted Coronavirus Patients For the Money and Tries To Exonerate Himself in the Nursing Home Scandal

Former NY State Governor George Pataki Says Gov. Cuomo's Nursing Home Strategy is a 'Disaster'
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New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo

Nearly 100 people may have died from coronavirus at a nursing home in New York City

By Sheena Jones, CNN

Updated 11:26 PM ET, Sat May 2, 2020

(CNN)There are 98 people who may have died from Covid-19 at the Isabella Center in New York City, according to a statement from the geriatric care facility.

This statement comes after New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat accused nursing homes of not accurately reporting Covid-19 deaths to the Department of Health.

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Espaillat wrote a letter addressed to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York State Attorney General Letitia James calling for an investigation into nursing home facilities.

"Recent reports suggest that nursing home administrators across the state have abandoned transparency, leaving patients unnerved and their families unenlightened as to the status of their loved ones' health. By withholding important information regarding facility conditions, patients' status, and the accurate number of cases and deaths related to Covid-19 from families and elected officials, nursing home administrators are abnegating their most fundamental duty," Espaillat said in the letter.

As the virus hit the 705-bed center, the facility did not have access to testing to "quickly diagnose" residents and staff, according to a statement from Isabella Center.

It noted that more access to testing is available and that the center has reported accurate data to the Department of Health since the beginning of the pandemic.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to accurately reflect a statement from the Isabella Center.

NYC nursing home’s staggering coronavirus deaths don’t match state reports

by Melissa Klein and Susan Edelman, NY POST, May 2, 2020

The state is seeking to account for as many as 98 residents of the Isabella Geriatric Center in Washington Heights who have reportedly died of COVID-19,  officials said Saturday.

The state lists only 13 deaths at the facility.

“We are working to verify all the information reported to us” at Isabella and all 613 nursing homes and 544 adult-care facilities, said Gary Holmes, a state Health Department spokesman.

Officials could not say whether Isabella deliberately misled the state. The facility insists it reported all deaths.

Gov. Cuomo Friday had harsh words for nursing homes, saying they submit numbers “under penalty of perjury.”

“You violate, you commit fraud, that is a criminal offense, period. So they can be prosecuted criminally for fraud on any of these reporting numbers,” he said.

On Saturday, a state Department of Heath website listed 13 deaths of Isabella residents as of May 1 despite news reports that nearly 100 facility residents had died.

The nursing home has acknowledged 60 confirmed and suspected COVID-19 deaths at the massive, 705-bed facility, plus 38 others who died of confirmed or suspected cases in the hospital.

Snafus in the state monitoring system are widespread, The Post found.

At the sprawling Hebrew Home in Riverdale, 25 residents have died of suspected or confirmed cases of the coronavirus since March 1, a spokeswoman said, but the state still lists the number at  zero.

The largest private nursing home in the state with 751 beds, Hebrew Home says half of the 14 patients who died in its beds were confirmed COVID-19 cases and half were presumed to have it. And another 11 of its residents died of the bug after being transported to hospitals.

“The Hebrew Home has been and continues to be fully transparent in its reporting of deaths due to covid,” spokeswoman Wendy Steinberg said.

The state website also lists the wrong name of a nursing home run by city Health + Hospitals.

An Isabella spokesperson declined to comment Saturday, but said last week, “From the beginning of this pandemic, Isabella has reported truthful and accurate data requested by the Department of Health. We have shared daily the number of confirmed and presumed positive cases at both the residence and hospital, including deaths.”

The state in the past had cited Isabella, and other nursing homes, for letting oxygen tubes connected to patients sit on the floor.

State health official Holmes said the agency is trying to “determine whether [the] facility is under reporting. We have not found that yet.

“We went back and asked every nursing home to provide all COVID-19 deaths, both confirmed and unconfirmed,” he said.

RANK Nepotism in New York City: The Mayor Appoints His Wife to the New NYC Task Force On Racial Diversity

John Lamparski/Getty Images

Bill de Blasio’s latest crazy, no-good nepotistic job for Chirlane McCray

By Post Editorial Board, April 26, 2020

Sigh: Mayor Bill de Blasio just named first lady Chirlane McCray to head his task force on ensuring New York is more racially just when it reopens. Are you laughing, or crying?

The mayor says his wife’s record running the ThriveNYC initiative makes her perfect for this new job. We guess that means the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity will spend a ton of money to no obvious effect, with half its component programs closed down after a year or two because they never made sense in the first place.

That was the story of Thrive, which was supposed to boost New Yorkers’ mental health but mainly seemed to hire people without ever figuring out what they should do. And which mainly steered clear of the city’s most urgent mental health problem, the huge portion of the homeless population that faces major psychiatric issues.

With roughly a billion dollars out the door, Thrive is on its third or fourth “reimagining.” The next mayor is sure to close it down, if the city council doesn’t do so first.

Of course, the idea of a racial justice unit as a core part of city government’s work on restarting the local economy is as misbegotten as Thrive ever was. Just as Thrive was the wrong approach to mental health, this will focus on peripheral (or patronage) issues rather than the clear but hard-to-address reasons why lower-income black and Hispanic New Yorkers have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus.

De Blasio claims that the crisis is an opportunity to fundamentally remake New York City economically and socially. In fact, the main challenge is to revive it at all. The chance that the virus will remain an ongoing threat for years poses a huge challenge to New York’s whole way of being: Density is now an enormous vulnerability, rather than a competitive advantage. If we can’t figure out how to make the subways safe, merely getting to work becomes a nightmare.

Even if you buy the mayor’s radical talk, his wife is the last person to put in charge: It’s impossible to manage your spouse as you would anyone else — you can’t fire her for incompetence for starters. (As Thrive proved.)

Indeed, the rank nepotism here suggests that de Blasio doesn’t even believe his own line: He’s just working the same old platitudes to justify putting his wife forward as a leader in hopes it will make her electable come 2021, as he seeks to install her as the next Brooklyn borough president.

Don’t laugh or cry, actually: This idiocy is cause for a primal scream.

BUSHWICK POL SLAMS MAYOR FOR APPOINTING HIS WIFE TO COVID-19 TASK FORCE

Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s Wife, Is Questioned Over His ‘Revolutionary’ $1 Billion Mental Health Plan

NY TIMES, March 22, 2019


With opaque budget and elusive metrics, $850M ThriveNYC program attempts a reset

By AMANDA EISENBERG

Politico, Feb. 27, 2019

The NYCHA Scandal and Coverup

How to End the Culture of Cover-up in New York City Public Housing

By Victor Bach, Center For New York City Affairs, July 11, 2018

Transgression followed by cover-up: This all-too-familiar scenario has played out again, this time in the disgraceful and high-profile failures to protect New York City public housing residents from decrepit and dangerous living conditions. Urgent repairs to the buildings, and restorations to the integrity and reputation, of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) are now clearly in order.

The far-reaching civil legal settlement City officials struck last month with Federal authorities laid out why in distressing detail. It confirmed failures and falsifications between 2010 and 2016 in lead paint inspections that endangered the health of children living in NYCHA developments and that occasioned a suit by tenants. It also documented a widespread, appalling pattern of neglect and deceit concerning repairs and abatement of apartment mold, failing furnaces, and other unsafe conditions.  A follow-up seizure of records and other items at a NYCHA office in Queens suggested that a separate criminal investigation may be underway, too.

NYCHA’s more than 400,000 public housing residents have long sounded alarms about worsening conditions in their apartments and buildings. The Community Service Society’s 2014 report Strengthening New York City’s Public Housing: Directions for Change was the first to systematically track the accelerated deterioration residents had experienced since 1999 and identify government disinvestment—at every level of government—as a root cause of these problems.

The consent decree settling the tenants’ lawsuit commits the City and State governments to some $4 billion in additional funding for repairs at NYCHA over the next four years that are to be overseen by a court-appointed outside monitor. Unfortunately, reporting last week on NYCHA’s state of disrepair showed that the housing authority still lacks more than $20 billion to pay for essential fixes and improvements. To raise that kind of money, NYCHA needs to shore up its badly damaged credibility with potential funders, as well as with its long-suffering tenants.

That can start by providing tenants something they’ve long been denied: Clear, publicly accessible information about progress, or lack thereof, in responding to their complaints about conditions and unmade repairs. Here’s our advice to City leaders, including Stanley Brezenoff, the housing authority’s new interim chair, for how to show that NYCHA is at last replacing a culture of cover-up with a commitment to transparency.

For example, today any tenant in a private multiple dwelling can call the 311 Citizen Service Center to register a housing complaint. The complaint—its date, location, and nature—is recorded and referred to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation (HPD) division of code enforcement for appropriate follow-up and, as necessary, an inspection.

That’s not been the case, however, if you live in public housing. A resident of a NYCHA development who dials 311 is instead automatically referred to the authority’s internal Centralized Call Center, which passes the complaint on to the development’s on-site manager. No record of the complaint is made outside NYCHA; much is left to the discretion of the manager.

In short, right now what happens in NYCHA stays in NYCHA, with no external records of complaints and outstanding violations that can be used to assess conditions and management responses. But daylight, as always, remains the best disinfectant—especially in ending the kind of deceptions NYCHA has practiced to hide building disrepair, including literally papering and painting over holes in apartment walls in advance of outside inspections. For that reason, NYCHA residents should be given access to the 311 Citizen Service Center and the City’s code enforcement system.

Similarly, any tenant in a private multiple dwelling can go to the public websites of HPD and the Department of Buildings (DOB), enter his or her address, and obtain a record of past code violations and whether and when they were cured. If a NYCHA resident enters an address, however, he/she will find no record in these data bases. NYCHA has enjoyed an exemption from these open records—but it has clearly forfeited its right to this so-called “gentlemen’s agreement.”

At the Community Service Society, we strongly recommend that NYCHA apartments and buildings be included in the public data bases maintained by HPD and DOB. Doing that will signal a welcome commitment to re-establishing NYCHA’s once-proud but now badly tarnished reputation for administering “public housing that works”—and to providing NYCHA tenants the safe, decent housing they deserve.