De Blasio: NYC may still send COVID patients back to nursing homes
It’s hard to believe New Yorkers not only elected, but re-elected, this man:
Mayor Bill de Blasio said some hospitalized patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus should still return to their nursing homes — even though they risk exposing other elderly residents to the deadly bug.
“If the better care in that individual case is the hospital, of course that’s a go-to option, but there’s going to be a time when a nursing home could be the better care if it’s set up that way,” de Blasio insisted on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday.
MSNBC host Willie Geist had asked de Blasio if the order issued by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to allow patients with coronavirus to leave hospitals and go back into nursing homes was a mistake, given that the death toll at nursing homes surged to 4,813 earlier this week — nearly a quarter of all fatalities in the state.
“The whole question is always where can a senior citizen get the best support, the best care, and sometimes that is of course a hospital and sometimes that is a place where they are known and where they can be supported by people who actually have a relationship with them,” de Blasio answered.
Actually no; the whole question with COVID is not “where can a senior citizen get the best support, the best care.” Another consideration is where that person can heal without putting other extremely vulnerable people at high risk. But that has been ignored by both de Blasio and Cuomo where nursing homes in their state are concerned.
It was known early on that the very elderly are at far more serious risk of dying from COVID than the rest of the population, and that is even more true of the already-debilitated elderly who are nursing home residents. This is also true, by the way, of nearly any flu or pneumonia. The toll in nursing homes can be exceptionally high.
But as time has gone on, we’ve learned that the percentage of nursing home deaths compared to total deaths from COVID is even higher than previously thought. In some states it’s over half, even well over half. And yet de Blasio, mayor of a city whose metropolitan area has had about half the COVID deaths in the entire US, seems to hardly have a clue what to do about it. It’s almost as though he’s just learned these facts that have been apparent for quite some time.
The toll in one NYC nursing home is 98 deaths so far and counting. That’s about one in every seven residents at that facility. De Blasio had this to say in response to that:
“The one thing we now know about the nursing homes is the status quo cannot continue to say the least,” de Blasio said. “Something very different has to happen.”
Oh, really? And what “very different” thing is actually going to happen? This should have been tackled long ago. It is hard to believe that a mayor of a city so hard hit would not be asking to learn the nursing home statistics on a daily basis, but his excuse is that the figures weren’t reported properly. That could also be true – there’s plenty of confusion and incompetence to go around. But we’ve all known for a long time that New York has been hard hit, and that nursing homes in general are nearly always very hard hit. Special attention should have been paid from the start, and it really appears as though that was not the case. In some ways, au contraire.
Ah, but here’s another thing de Blasio has to say about nursing homes. When in doubt, blame the kulak capitalists:
.@NYCMayor De Blasio on nursing homes: "A lot of these are for-profit organizations. I think there’s going to be a lot of questions about whether they put their residents first or whether they put profit first" pic.twitter.com/KfPZNAXH0d
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 6, 2020
Unbelievable. One of those “for profit” CEOs of a large nursing home, which was hard-hit, said COVID patients began arriving with no notice whatever — no time to set up a separate wing, no PPE for staff, nothing. De Blasio and Cuomo just want to wash their hands of any responsibility for sick elderly New Yorkers.
He reminds me of a relative of mine, who said, when Obamacare was being voted on, that she didn’t think anyone should be “allowed” to make a profit on health care.
Cuomo is Kodos the Executioer
und Kaiser Warren Wilhelm II ist eine scheisskopf
A nursing home, where the “capitalists” are forced by the State to admit diseased people, is not “capitalism”, but rather, a socialist fist wrapped in a “capitalist” glove.
This is how New York is going to cut its health care costs and retirement benefits costs. Cuomo has decided to kill all those in the nursing homes.
Meanwhile, he is taxing those who responded to the call for volunteer medical help. Their paychecks, paid by their home states, are subject to NY income tax if they worked for 14 days in the state. Cool, eh? No good deed goes unpunished.
Just don’t ask for help in your next emergency.
Elections have consequences. In NYS the consequences are deadly.
Weeks ago, when I heard NY was forcing nursing homes to take active virus cases back, my first thought was the horror of that and then I thought that they are deliberately running the death toll up. Everybody was told to social distance so the vulnerable did not get the disease, and then they deliberately sent infected patients back to homes with the most vulnerable.
edward – beat me to it, but here’s a link.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/new_yorks_cuomo_to_volunteer_first_responders_pay_up.html
A pilot friend of ours was stuck in NYC for 2 weeks, finally got home Saturday.
At the airport, he encountered a group of those exhausted volunteers returning home.
If anyone else was planning to go help Gotham, they should definitely reconsider.
This is not exactly of the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ category, but it is a reminder of the vulnerability of the aged, as well as a testament to those who have spent their lives in voluntary service.
https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/coronavirus-tears-through-beloved-michigan-convent-devoted-service
A profile of the individuals is available on the site. If there is a reward for the meekestt and most humble, the first profiled in that series (not directly linked here) certainly qualifies for it.
These are great policy conundrums:
Should government try to minimize deaths per capita? or
Should government try to maximize QALY’s, quality adjusted life-years, for all its constituents?
Does government have any responsibility for future people? Eg should we spend capital now to design vaccine development institutions and manufacturing plants for people living 10 years from now?…knowing that this has an opportunity cost now? and knowing that we never predict the future very well?
Are QALYs delivered to young adults more important than adding quality years to an 80 year old? …from a population health view?
The NHS in the UK used to say that it was worth it to spend about L40,000 for one QALY. What should we shoot for?
” I think there’s going to be a lot of questions about whether they put their residents first or whether they put profit first”
With no profit they close. I suspect that if the government was running the nursing homes they would be run a lot like they run the VA hospitals.
Bring on the questions – because the answers are going to flay Cuomo and deBlasio alive.
IF the derelict media can bring themselves to do some journalism instead of propaganda for a change.
https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/04/26/people-reveal-horrible-effect-of-new-york-policy-to-send-virus-patients-to-nursing-homes-and-its-even-worse-than-that/
https://nypost.com/2020/04/24/new-york-nursing-home-denied-requests-to-send-covid-19-patients-to-usns-comfort/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-mandates-nursing-homes-take-covid-19-patients-discharged-from-hospitals-11585228215
“State cites urgent need to expand hospital capacity; doctors group says decision ‘represents a clear and present danger to all of the residents of a nursing home.’ ”
https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/28/cuomo-claims-he-didnt-know-about-new-york-rule-forcing-nursing-homes-to-accept-elderly-with-covid-19/
https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/05/06/de-blasio-nyc-may-still-send-covid-patients-back-to-nursing-homes/#comment-2493068
https://nypost.com/2020/04/26/cuomo-doubles-down-on-sending-coronavirus-patients-to-nursing-homes/
and so on…