Bill de Blasio: ‘We have to get the full truth’ on nursing home deaths in New York

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday that the public has to get the “full truth” surrounding coronavirus deaths in nursing homes in the state after a scathing report from the state attorney general said the number was undercounted by as much as 50%.

“We have to get the full truth, and we have to make sure it never ever happens again, nothing like this happens again, and we have to be honest about the numbers,” the mayor said in a press conference.

“These are our loved ones we lost,” Mr. de Blasio said. “It’s someone’s grandma, someone’s mother or father, aunt, or uncle. I mean, this is families missing someone dear to them. … I’ve talked to people all over the city who have lost folks and they could not be with them. It made it much more horrible. So, this was just — you know, among all the other pain that we went through in 2020, this was arguably the very worst part of it. We have to make sense of this.”

The mayor’s comments came just hours after state Attorney General Letitia James said investigators found data that suggest many nursing home residents died after being transferred to the hospital, and that number wasn’t reflected in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tally of 8,500 deaths.

“Among those findings were that a larger number of nursing home residents died from COVID-19 than the New York State Department of Health’s (DOH) published nursing home data reflected and may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent,” the attorney general’s office said in a news release announcing the report. “The investigations also revealed that nursing homes’ lack of compliance with infection control protocols put residents at increased risk of harm, and facilities that had lower pre-pandemic staffing ratings had higher COVID-19 fatality rates. Based on these findings and subsequent investigation, Attorney General James is conducting ongoing investigations into more than 20 nursing homes whose reported conduct during the first wave of the pandemic presented particular concern.”

Mr. Cuomo has not responded to the report.