Im a nursing home doctor Cuomos lies deepen NYs grief

On Sunday, I wept with relatives of those who perished from COVID in New York nursing homes.Five years after former Gov.Andrew Cuomo’s notorious directive of March 25, 2020, the pain I experienced as a nursing-home physician taking care of sick and dying COVID patients is still raw.Like those families, I become furious every time I hear Cuomo claim he was simply following federal guidelines when he sent scores of infectious COVID patients from hospitals into nursing homes — and that therefore, all objections to his order are politically motivated.I know he’s wrong.

I helped sound the alarm as soon as he issued it.As Cuomo campaigns to become New York City’s next mayor, he’s blaming his order on guidelines from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that were meant to help nursing homes manage individual patients suspected of having COVID.The guidance said that staff should use gowns, gloves, masks and face shields when giving care, and should not mix new patients admitted from hospitals with pre-existing residents.That was it.But Cuomo’s Health Department, which regulates the homes, twisted those guidelines: Instead, Albany ordered the mass transfer of infected COVID patients from hospitals into nursing homes as an officially sanctioned response to the pandemic — something CMS never said.Specifically, the department said nursing homes “must” accept any patient that was medically stable, and could not deny admission “solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”The state Health Department’s “must comply” order bullied homes into admitting thousands of contagious patients from hospitals — not only patients that the homes had previously transferred out for acute care, but many others unfamiliar to them.In truth, the March 25 memo actually violated the CDC standards for responding to a respiratory pandemic.These rules explicitly said that the role of nursing homes during a pandemic surge situation is t...