‘Under no circumstances should a hospital discharge a patient to a nursing home that is not prepared to take care of those patients’ needs…’
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed the “Republican administration” for his decision to put coronavirus-positive patients in nursing homes, but an administration official said he is wrong, Fox News reported.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma said neither her agency nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructed nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients.
Instead, President Donald Trump’s administration put rules in place to subsidize the hospital stays of elderly patients who cannot safely return to their nursing homes.
“Under no circumstances should a hospital discharge a patient to a nursing home that is not prepared to take care of those patients’ needs,” Verma said.
Cuomo was referring to a March 13 directive from the CDC, which states that “nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present.”
“What New York did was follow what the Republican administration said to do,” Cuomo said. “That’s not my attempt to politicize it. It’s my attempt to depoliticize it. So don’t criticize the state for following the president’s policy.”
Verma said she disagrees with Cuomo’s interpretation of the guidance, “that somehow federal guidance said you should put people who are COVID-positive in the nursing home.”
She said nursing homes “will have COVID-positive people,” but only nursing homes that are prepared to contain those patients and prevent the virus from spreading to other healthy elderly people.
More than 6,000 elderly people have died in New York state’s nursing homes. Plus, an unknown number of nursing-home residents died at hospitals, while away from their nursing homes.
“President Trump took very early actions when it came to nursing homes,” Verma said. “We prohibited visitors [and] put out guidance to both nursing homes and states.”