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With "No Support" From The State, Patients Endure "A Living Nightmare" In NY's Hardest Hit Nursing Home
By
Jake Offenhartz
Published Apr 24, 2020
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John Minchillo/AP/Shutterstock
By
Jake Offenhartz
Published Apr 24, 2020
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When Mina Clarke arrived at the Cobble Hill Health Center in late March, she had no idea she was entering a hotbed of New York’s deepening nursing home crisis. The 37-year-old Bed Stuy native, fresh off a major orthopedic surgery and unable to walk, didn’t think much of the ambulances parked outside the sprawling brick building. She thought of how peaceful the tree-lined Brooklyn neighborhood seemed this time of year.
Three weeks later, Clarke was wheeled out of the facility, sick with COVID-19 and traumatized by an experience she describes as a “living nightmare.” She recalled sleepless nights on the “first floor of death,” listening helplessly as her elderly neighbors' cries for oxygen went unanswered.
At one point, she says, the woman she shared a room with, who was in her 80s and on a nebulizer, slumped out of bed and hit her head on the ground, where she remained for over thirty minutes. “She begged me to help her up and all I could do was scream for the nurses but no one came," Clarke said.
Residents at the facility, which serves both older nursing home residents and younger short-term care patients, didn’t know then that more than 100 workers at Cobble Hill had called out sick, or that home’s administrator was pleading with the state for more masks and gowns. But Clarke says it was clear the virus was spreading rapidly.
Nurses wore kitchen aprons and trash bags, and spoke openly about the scarcity of personal protective equipment. There seemed to be little effort to separate the patients with obvious respiratory symptoms from those who hadn’t yet caught the virus, she said.
“I will never get over this,” Clarke told Gothamist, speaking from an Airbnb where she quarantining to protect her son, and still suffering from a high fever. “People need to see what’s happening inside these closed quarters.”
She added, "If our governor really wanted to help, he would have first protected the nursing homes."
As the novel coronavirus has swept through long-term care facilities across the country, the Cobble Hill Health Center has become the focus of national attention. According to state data released last week, the 360-bed facility has recorded 55 deaths linked to COVID-19, topping the list in New York, and among the highest of any home in the nation.
Donny Tuchman, the CEO of Cobble Hill, did not dispute the allegations of staff and equipment shortages raised by Clarke. The facility was doing all that it could, he said, given the lack of response from the state for additional staff, protective equipment, and tests.
Emails shared with Gothamist show Tuchman repeatedly implored the state Department of Health and the NYC Office of Emergency Management for more supplies throughout early April. "Is there a way for us to send out suspected covid cases to the Javits center or the ship?" he wrote on April 9th. "We don't have the ability to cohort right now based on staffing and we really want to protect our other patients."
That request, Tuchman said, was denied.
A room inside the Cobble Hill Health Center
Provided to Gothamist
New York’s 613 long-term care facilities are licensed by the Health Department, which normally conducts unannounced inspections every 9 to 15 months. Advocates say those visits seem to have slowed or stopped entirely since the pandemic began.
On Thursday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the agency would begin investigating nursing homes that were not isolating symptomatic patients or providing staff with personal protective equipment. Those found not to be in compliance could receive a $10,000 fine or lose their license.
According to state data released on Wednesday, nursing homes and adult care facilities in New York have reported 3,540 fatalities from COVID-19, nearly a quarter of the state’s total deaths.
Facing questions about the growing death toll — and criticism for saying this week that “it’s not our job” to provide PPE to private nursing homes — the governor stressed that the state had sent thousands of pieces of protective equipment to the facilities. “Nursing homes, they are our top priority,” he told reporters on Thursday. “They have been from day one.”
But leaders of New York’s homes say that is not the case. According to Tuchman, even as local homes became overwhelmed, the state made clear there was a “pecking order,” in which the elder care facilities were not a priority. The absence of state backing continued even after a controversial state order required nursing homes to admit patients infected with COVID-19. Because of a lack of PPE, Tuchman said, more than a third of his staff have called out sick.
"There is no way for us to prevent the spread under these conditions,” Tuchman wrote to health officials on April 8th. The same day, the Times reported that 90,000 retired and active health care workers had signed up online to volunteer in New York at Cuomo's urging.
But only a fraction of those reinforcements were put to work, and even fewer made it to New York's chronically understaffed nursing homes. “There were mechanisms through which surge staffing could be requested, and let’s just say they were not made available to the nursing home industry until very late in the game,” Tuchman said.
While the remaining workers did their best to isolate patients, the Cobble Hill facility, like many nursing homes, was unable to get more than a handful of tests, making it impossible to discern who was sick with the virus. Of the 55 deaths linked to COVID-19 reported by Cobble Hill, only one person had received a positive diagnosis. (Tuchman maintains the state’s nursing home data is “misleading,” since many are not reporting presumed deaths.)
As the crisis spiraled, the CEO made a last ditch effort to move those at-risk to New York's overflow facilities. Both the USNS Comfort and the Javits Center, which have a combined 2,000 bed capacity but have sat mostly empty since late March, were reserved for hospital patients, Tuchman says he was told.
Neither the Governor's Office nor the Department of Health responded to inquiries about why that request was turned down.
“There was no support and we all had to go it alone," Tuchman said.
On Thursday, Cuomo once again reiterated that any nursing home struggling to care for patients could get help. "If you can't do it, we'll put them in a facility that can do it," he said. "That's the rule."
Asked if there was anything different the state could have done to ensure the safety of residents, Cuomo offered his own theory: the crisis was inevitable.
“Mother Nature brought a virus,” he said. “The virus attacks old people. Nothing went wrong. Nobody's to blame for the creation of the situation.”
Tagged
COVID-19
nursing home
coronavirus
Cuomo
Jake Offenhartz
Jake Offenhartz is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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