ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) — The Empire Center filed a lawsuit against the state Department of Health on Friday.
“This case isn’t about assigning blame or embarrassing political leaders,” said Bill Hammond, the Empire Center’s senior fellow for health policy. “It’s about gaining a full and accurate understanding of what happened, which is crucial to improving our defenses against the next pandemic.”
The Empire Center says it submitted a Freedom of Information Law request for data on nursing home operations to DOH on August 3. They say these records track deaths among nursing home residents, and would help determine how many died from coronavirus since the outbreak began.
The FOIL request sought the number who died in a hospital after being transferred out of a nursing home. The Empire Center says DOH leaves those individuals out of its official tally. In a letter dated August 31, DOH responded to the request by saying they would provide the information no sooner than November 5 “because a diligent search for relevant documents is still being conducted.”
On Wednesday, DOH said the records “need to be located and then reviewed,” before releasing them for public consumption.
The lawsuit seeks the release of Health Emergency Response Data System submissions. Through HERDS, DOH collects daily numbers of confirmed and presumed coronavirus deaths inside and outside nursing homes or assisted care facilities.
The Albany-based Empire Center is an independent, nonprofit think-tank usually focused on economic policy. Although the Empire Center describes itself as nonpartisan, watchdog groups generally classify it as a conservative-leaning organization.
“The biggest problem for the state is the enormous, recurring structural budget gap starting next year and into the future,” said E.J. McMahon of the conservative-leaning Empire Center. “Cuomo clearly hopes that starting in 2021, (Democratic presidential candidate Joseph) Biden and a Democratic Congress will provide states and local government a couple of year’s worth of added stimulus. Read More
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“The importance of discussing this and getting the true facts out is to understand what did and didn’t happen so we can learn from it in case this happens again,” Hammond said. Read More
No doubt, the Health Department and the governor would like this report to be the final word on the subject.
But if it’s all the same with them, we’d still like a truly independent review. Read More
The New York State Department of Health has concluded that an executive order requiring nursing homes to readmit coronavirus patients, issued by Governor Andrew Cuomo, was not the driving factor behind coronavirus deaths in the state’s nursing homes. Read More