Wood House 76

Some thoughts & reminders before the next episode of The Pretend Pandemic Accountability Show.

Tomorrow, Andrew Cuomo will be testifying to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about his administration’s “handling” of COVID, with a focus on nursing homes. 

There are sure to be many dumb distractions, irrelevant, details & elaborate theatrics. Cuomo is a superlative actor, script-deliverer, & protector of the federal government’s narratives. (Reminder that the man won an Emmy for his “pandemic” press conferences as “wartime” governor of New York.)

“Treat it Like a War”

I don’t expect him to depart from what he said in a dress rehearsal video  he put out this past June, which actually included a number of correct things that people don’t want to hear, especially when it comes to the much-scapegoated “nursing home policy.” 

Whatever he & those “questioning” him end up saying, it’s best to consider the performance(s) a Uniparty effort aimed at feigning “accountability” and keeping secret what actually happened in New York City in spring 2020. 

There is nothing that will be said that’s not pre-approved for the public to hear. I don’t expect questions or probing about hospitals, ambulance transports/protocols, or the still-unexplained home death event. 

Regarding hospitals, a graph of deaths occurring daily at NYC hospitals in 2019 & 2020 shows what must be the biggest mass casualty event ever experienced by a U.S. hospital system.

The claim (affirmed by the Feds) is that NYC hospitals handled an extra 15,000+ bodies in two months.¹

How was that possible, especially when all the trucks FEMA sent weren’t used as mobile morgues? Where are the nurses & doctors who can speak to the cataclysm? Who is producing the commemorative documentary?

To date, we have NO idea how many nursing home residents died in hospitals, or who all the other people were that died in hospitals, or if the near-impossible event presented in the above image actually happened in real-time in hospitals. (Much circumstantial evidence & a number of discrepancies point to “highly unlikely”.) 

I continue to take issue with the pervasive belief that Andrew Cuomo’s March 25, 2020 advisory stating that nursing homes shouldn’t/couldn’t reject admissions or readmission of discharges from hospitals on the basis of COVID positivity – created a mass casualty event in NYC nursing homes.²

Here’s why: 

• It doesn’t work with the timing. NH residents were testing positive from the get-go. It wasn’t discharged patients from hospitals that introduced positivity into the facilities. 
• Data on yearly discharges from NYC hospitals to skilled nursing facilities shows a ~15K DROP in such discharges (which – curiously – fits the ~15K INCREASE in hospital deaths in the spring). 
• The biggest % increase, most COVID deaths, and most deaths occurred in HOSPITALS, not in nursing homes. State data say there were roughly 2,000 NH resident “COVID” deaths in NYC hospitals, but that’s not even 10% of the 22K-death all-cause toll in hospitals between mid-March 2020 through May 2020…and could be all within expected range, for all we know.

• “The policy” wasn’t Cuomo’s brainchild; it was from the Feds and was consistent with what CMS and CDC said to do. The Greater New York Hospital Association also wanted the policy enacted to free up beds in hospitals (which data show were NOT overrun). It’s no mistake the policy was issued the same day the CARES Act was passed.
• Media and reports often cite the figure of “9,000 transfers from hospitals into nursing homes” being executed while the advisory was in effect from March thru early May 2020. But that’s the statewide number. I’ve yet to see a time-series of it or numbers specific to New York City. The purported relationship between the transfers and the timing of daily death curve toll inside nursing homes is unclear.³ (My year-plus effort to test my hypothesis that nursing home residents were systematically transferred into hospitals in the months and weeks prior to the National Emergency declaration ended in a public agency abruptly closing my records request.)

Saying this is unlikely to increase my popularity, but I think the policy makes sense and isn’t inherently deadly. Here’s my thinking:

• Why would you keep someone in the hospital and continue to test them until negative as though the negative (or positive) result means anything? It doesn’t! 
• Persistent positivity on such tests is a problem – and it more of a problem in the elderly infirm, if studies I’ve read on the phenomenon are correct. Mass-transferring NH residents to hospitals in the first place is suspect, especially when the CARES Act was paying hospitals for COVID cases & deaths. 
• Even the decision to transfer a NH resident can be deleterious to the patient’s health. In a systematic review of related studies, Lemoyne et al (2019) found, “Of all acute transfers of NH residents to an ED, 4 to 55% were classified as inappropriate.” Transferring to the hospital and back again can’t be good for patients on the edge of life either.
• There was never any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was “spreading” or suddenly spreading from person to person.⁴ So this focus on “COVID+ people being sent into nursing homes” is really only serving to reinforce The Government Narrative. Sadly, a novel-spreading-deadly virus isn’t needed to kill nursing home residents, and Cuomo’s end-of-March 2020 policy is doing much to cover straight up neglect & other crimes. 

Do NOT misunderstand me: A lot nursing home residents died in spring 2020 – in New York City and elsewhere – and were maltreated/nontreated for any number of things ailments and conditions, denied basic rights, couldn’t see loved ones, were left alone by fearful staff, etc. And we still don’t know how many died, irrespective of cause or place. (The same is true for the U.S. as a whole, as well as many states.) 

Government has EVERY reason to lie about not only CAUSE of death, but magnitude, timing, and place of death. Ideally, we need more than numbers, because numbers on a screen are NOT proof. They are claims about the number of records that exist. So, let’s see the death certificates. Show us the names. Prove that no one died more than once, and that no one died in the nursing home AND at the hospital (for example). 

If tomorrow turns out NOT to be another dog-and-pony show and is instead chock-full of new disclosures that take us closer to truth, accountability, & justice, no one will be clapping louder than I will be.

But if it’s the perfunctory parade of tropes and fauxpologies I expect, then we are still in need of some kind of catalyst or fuel for people to wake up and vociferously demand a legitimate inquiry of what exactly happened in New York City.⁵

I get that calling for an investigation before an election is super inconvenient to desired results on all sides, but the fact that the New York event was used to justify a pandemic/national emergency declaration, convince the world a deadly coronavirus was spreading, and coerce an unnecessary shot onto the population isn’t going away.

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My first Substack article related to the NYC Nursing Home death toll was this one, although I started to address the issue in this response to Michael Senger.

Maybe the Committee will ask Andrew Cuomo about the Bill Maher’s claim that people died in nursing homes because poor people are the caretakers and “poor people get COVID”.

Footnotes

1. Mid-March to Mid-May (from a ~4,600 in 2019 to ~20,000 in 2020) ↩︎
2. Past tweets show that I also blamed “the nursing home policy” for the NY toll, before I had reasons to probe the data further, so I make no claims to having been onto this diversion from the start. I could also be wrong about it now – the point is that neither the narrative nor acceptable counter-narrative fit with official data, documents, etc. ↩︎
3. I’ve read the all of the published reports related to the NY nursing home questions/ issue.  ↩︎
4. The “first” instance of such transmission in the U.S. wasn’t, as far as I can tell. ↩︎
5. Not a typo. A fauxpology is my term for a fake apology. There is no real confession, repentance, ownership, sense of guilt, or desire to accept consequences (e.g., I’m sorry that happened…I’m sorry I wasn’t the best I could be…I’m sorry we weren’t prepared enough for the virus to hit so hard…) ↩︎