“Every day when you think of her and you miss her so much, it’s just awful,” he told CNN at his home in Albany.
Agnes Minissale died in April after contracting Covid-19 at her nursing home, Minissale said. She would have been 94 years old on Valentine’s Day. Minissale’s father-in-law, Edward Bridgeford, was in the same nursing home and died of the virus two weeks later, he said. Both became ill in the nursing home and later died in hospital.
Peter Arbeeny takes his last farewell from his 89-year-old father, Norman Arbeeny, home more than a week after taking him out of a nursing home in Brooklyn in late March.
“It was a horrible, emotionally challenging time to treat a sick parent who needed medical help. And we were in a race to get him out of the nursing home. We found him, but he came out with Covid. , “says Arbeeny.
But beyond the fear of losing loved ones to the coronavirus, families in New York had to deal with the politics surrounding the deaths.
Minissale was outspoken about his frustration with the Cuomo administration’s handling of the pandemic pandemic. Arbeeny, a lifelong Democrat who voted for Cuomo, says ‘Democrats are on the wrong side of history with this issue’ and promises to put an end to why so many residents of nursing homes in the state have died.
Covid-19 destroys nursing homes in New York
This is an advice that was discussed for these families on March 25 last year. In it, Cuomo implemented an order requiring nursing homes to accept patients transferred from hospitals previously tested positive for Covid-19 if the patients are considered medically stable. .
The families believe the advice partially pushed the virus into the residences where the most vulnerable live.
“He (Cuomo) said we can not allow (Covid-19) to come into nursing homes, it will (residents) go through like wildfire,” Minissale said, referring to one of the governor’s daily briefings on Covid -19, “and at the same time as he tells you this, he’s putting out a mandate … that contradicts itself. ‘
Minissale lost his mother and father-in-law in the period of six weeks it took for the Cuomo government to revoke the order.
Cuomo addressed the issue during a lengthy news conference Monday, complete with the usual maps and personal reflections we expected from the governor.
He referred to guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which he said were followed according to his administration. “Cuomo said at the time that hospital residents were unlikely to be contagious because at that time the virus load was so low that they were not contagious.”
Cuomo also said that the recovery of Covid-19 patients would be transferred from hospitals as soon as possible so that they would not contract a secondary infection, and that nursing homes could only accept the patients if they were able to care for them.
He doubles his claim that caregivers brought the virus into the facilities, not the order.
“Covid did not come into the nursing homes through people coming out of hospitals,” Cuomo said Monday. “Covid came into the nursing homes through staff who walked into the nursing home when we did not even know we had Covid.”
In a Friday news conference, dr. Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said he stood by their decision on March 25.
“We made the right decision about public health at the time, and before the same facts, we would make the same decisions again,” he said.
He added that at the time, models showed that hospitalizations were increasing “at a staggering pace,” and that the state no longer had ICU capacity.
He further said that since May – when the advice was revoked – no resident was admitted to a facility without a negative test, visits have been restricted and staff are tested twice a week.
“And yet we still see outbreaks and deaths in nursing homes, the same number of deaths in nursing homes as we saw before March 25 after March 25 and in the fall and winter,” Zucker said.
Their explanation is one that the families have heard before, and according to them one that does not pick up.
They feel that the governor has made a bad call and wonder why he did not consider other options, such as repairing long-term caregivers in field facilities, such as the Javits Center, to repair rather than in their home facilities.
The families want the Cuomo government to take ownership of the role that the advice played in spreading the virus in these facilities at the height of the New York pandemic.
“He did not allow us to grieve, that’s what really irritates me. Just possess your mistakes and let us learn from them and move on,” Arbeeny said.
Claims of a cover-up
Early in the pandemic, New York only publicly disclosed information about Covid-19 deaths, categorized according to where people died.
Ministries say, for example, that his mother and father-in-law were listed in hospitals as deaths, not as nursing homes.
For some families who lost loved ones to Covid-19 in nursing homes, the decision to release the data was an attempt to hide the real cost of Cuomo’s actions, including the March 25 order.
In a virtual meeting with a group of Democratic lawmakers last week, Cuomo’s top assistant, Melissa DeRosa, admitted to lawmakers that they ‘froze’ after receiving the DOJ request.
“We were in a position where we were not sure whether what we would give to the Department of Justice or what we would give to you, what we were going to use against us,” she said according to a transcript of the call made by the governors’ office was issued.
“If they froze from an investigation letter, what do they think they did to us with their March 25 assignment,” Arbeeny said, “You say you follow the federal guidelines, can we see communication? Can you tell us the health? show “caregivers who said it was a good idea?”
Earlier this month, it was a ruling by the Supreme Court in New York in favor of the Empire Center for Public Policy, which forced the state to provide a true report of the number of deaths in Covid-19 at nursing homes.
“His (Cuomo) explanation does not hold water. I do not know if we will ever get a straight answer,” said Bill Hammond, senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy. “He has seriously damaged his credibility. It is important for the public to trust people who make decisions.”
CNN has called the Cuomo government for a response to the families’ comments, but has not yet heard.
Demand for apology and investigation
Cuomo on Monday claimed responsibility for the “gap” in the delay in disclosing the data, but said his government had not hidden anything and the numbers released by the Department of Health were accurate.
“The void we created by not providing information was filled with skepticism and cynicism and conspiracy theories that fueled the confusion … and it raised more concerns for the families of loved ones,” he said.
But some families and lawmakers believe Cuomo is playing politics and that his explanations are not helpful.
“We apologized and we did not get it (Monday). We got defense, we got bending. We needed empathy from him. We needed respect from our governor,” Arbeeny said.
Hammond says his nonprofit is now “analyzing” the data to determine the impact of the March 25 order.
Ministries and Labor say they hope the state legislature will investigate further, what Republicans asked for and what was discussed by the Democrats, according to CNN’s report.
“I did not ask for his resignation. I did not ask for an accusation. I wanted nothing more than an apology and proper investigation,” Arbeeny said, “the truth never needs to be explained again, but the lies. “
Cuomo said Monday he explained what happened and there is nothing to investigate.
Aaron Cooper and Kristina Sgueglia contributed to this story.