Former Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine faced difficult questioning during a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday regarding deviations in state records on COVID-related deaths in nursing homes.
Levine was nominated by President Biden to serve as Assistant Secretary to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“You assured me that Pennsylvania did not do what New York did, and that it was accurately reported,” Sen said. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told LevineThursday. “However, I was told that in September 2020, Spotlight PA reported issues with insufficient disclosure of cases and deaths in nursing homes,” she went on to point out facilities that apparently reported ‘no data’, while the facilities claim that they .
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Levine said these discrepancies could be explained by a “delay time” between deaths when the Electronic Death Alert System (EDRS) was hit in Pennsylvania.
But the state publication Keystone – Spotlight PA – claims the statement of ‘delay time’ given by Levine on Thursday does not actually answer for the contradictions they found.
The problem arose after nursing homes reported their coronavirus cases and deaths to the health department themselves through separate online portals, not through the state’s EDRS, as Levine claimed Thursday.
The lack of uniform reporting allegedly led to irregularities and incomplete records.
In an effort to correct the reporting discrepancies, the Pennsylvania Department of Health notified in a June 18 letter that they could face fines or jail time if they did not meet the state’s reporting requirements.
But Spotlight PA has found that although irregularities claim to submit their coronavirus nursing home data through the state system, irregularities persist.
In addition, the facilities were either frustrated by the fact that their public-public data was crammed with errors, or they could not explain why their data was completely excluded from the state’s weekly reports.
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Investigative reporting by the outlet has found that the errors continue to plague the state’s EDRS. On 17 February, 139 facilities recorded ‘no data’, followed by the missing data for 145 facilities in the following week, on 23 February.
Fox News could not immediately reach the Department of Health for comment, but found that more than half of all deaths reported in Pennsylvania came from COVID-19 cases found in nursing homes.
Pennsylvania has reported nearly 923,000 cases of coronavirus since the onset of the pandemic, with nearly 24,000 deaths, 12,355 of which were reported by nursing homes.