To: Saulamanca who wrote (23917 ) 5/29/2020 10:13:14 PM From: Saulamanca Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 49295 New York’s nursing home horrors are even worse than you think By Betsy McCaughey May 29, 2020 | 7:58pm Patricia Castillo remembers when the Newfane Rehab and Health Care Center, where her mother lived, notified her that a patient had just been admitted from a nearby Niagara County hospital with COVID-19. Jill Sawyer, whose father lived at the same nursing home, remembers getting notified, too. “It was just a death sentence,” said Sawyer. The virus raced through Newfane, killing Castillo’s mother and Sawyer’s father and 24 other residents. “My father was only 70 years old,” Sawyer sighs, and he was still “shuffling around and calling me 20 times a day.” Now, she says the phone doesn’t ring and she misses that. COVID-19 has killed at least 11,000 to 12,000 nursing-home and assisted-living residents in New York, nearly double what the state admits to. And as the deaths mount, so have the lies and cover-ups. The carnage started in March, when hospitals inundated with COVID-19 patients insisted on clearing out elderly patients, even if they were still infected, and sending them to whatever nursing homes had empty beds . To swing that, they had to get rid of a safety regulation requiring patients to test negative twice for COVID-19 before being placed in a home. The state Health Department willingly complied. On March 25, Gov. Cuomo’s Health Department mandated that nursing homes had to accept COVID patients and barred requiring any COVID tests for admission. Facilities like Newfane had to fly blind, not knowing which incoming patients had it. The American Health Care Association called it a “recipe for disaster.” The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths urged Cuomo to change course. Continued