Plus, other problems with what Zucker said in an interview excerpt featured in the committee’s recent report.
In a previous article, I reported a severe discrepancy between bed occupancy data for “epicenter” Elmhurst Hospital in Queens in two different files: one published by the state of New York, and the other provided in response to my freedom of information request. Both datasets cannot be true if they represent the same thing.
The state’s file is incomplete and reports occupancy levels roughly 20%-40% higher than HHC’s file. The datasets are in 100% agreement for one day, 16 April 2020, with each showing 307 beds occupied.
Potential explanations for discrepancy I gave were HHC excluding some bed types or transfers within Elmhurst or from other public hospitals to Elmhurst being double-counted. Neither possibility changes the alarming appearance of the incomplete ‘red line’ data, which is what was presented to the public to justify reports of that New York City hospitals were overrun with suddenly-sick patients. If the blue-line data are “the truth,” one or more agencies may be guilty of data manipulation.
Howard Zucker: “A Crisis at Elmhurst Hospital”
The recent release of a final report from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic included testimony about Elmhurst from former New York state health commissioner Howard Zucker.
In the context of questions about the Cuomo administration’s 25 March 2020 nursing home directive, Zucker said:
“And at that point, we also had, around this same time, a crisis at Elmhurst Hospital, where they had about 234 positive people in the hospital with COVID out of their 400-or-so beds, and 13 had died in one 24-hour period.“
Zucker is not specific about the day on which “234 positive people” were “in the hospital with COVID” – or what they were “positive for” – but the “13 had died in one 24-hour period” was reported by The New York Times on March 25th.¹ So it’s fair to say “around the same time” would have been in the week of March 22nd.
In saying “out of their 400 or so beds” it’s unclear if Zucker meant 400 total beds were occupied or there were 400 beds total in the hospital (occupied or not). Elmhurst’s normal total bed number is 500+ across various types and including beds for female prisoners, per a state profile.
Zucker’s statement doesn’t help resolve the conflict in the discrepant datasets. Looking at the first week both datasets are complete, Zucker’s “234 positive people out of their 400 or so beds” is roughly the ratio of HHC’s occupancy number and the state’s number. It’s reasonable to wonder if HHC’s data is ‘positive’ bed occupants and NYS’s data is all occupants.
However, I have no reason to believe HHC gave me bed occupancy for COVID+ patients only. It’s not what I requested and (more importantly) HHC’s occupancy file extends back to April 2016 and is therefore more reliable. NYS, by contrast, said they don’t have data before 26 March 2020. NYS does report total number of staffed beds in its file, whereas HHC refused to give me those data for the timeframe I requested. So neither agency is being entirely forthcoming.
The difference between data reported for March 31 and April 1 is too high to be ignored. The figure above shows the state reporting a 31% increase (122 patients) in occupancy, while HHC shows the highest single-day increase HHC file of 11% (29 patients), between March 30 and March 31. Nothing Howard Zucker said explains the disparity.
Other Points About & Problems with Zucker’s “Context”
Other problematic things Zucker said for ‘context’ in the portion excerpted for the subcommittee’s report (on p 223, image below) are relevant to my ongoing independent investigation of the New York event and worth comment or emphasis.
Zucker said:
“Now we’re in March, the middle of March, and the numbers are going up. The third week of March the cases were escalating at a rapid pace, and I would wake up in the morning with 1,000 more positive cases.”
The middle of March 2020 (aka “15 Days to Slow the Spread”) is around the time when hospitals began testing existing patients. Whether Zucker knew case numbers being reported in March were not from an onslaught of acutely ill people arriving to the hospital in need of treatment and admission, I’m not sure, but every American needs to understand that the mass deployment of testing in hospitals (and, to a lesser degree, care homes) – and with every patient admitted irrespective of ailment or condition – is how the appearance of a sudden spreading virus was created. (Process outlined here.)
The same thing was done in 2009 (H1N1) and 2003 (SARS), but without the part where thousands of doctors were effectively directed to apply a euthanasia protocol to patients testing positive (i.e., sink the damaged ships).
What Zucker fails to grasp – or confess – is that cases looked like they escalating at a rapid pace because a ‘case’ was a positive result on a PCR test and it was testing that was rapidly escalating.
Zucker also said, “…unbelievable numbers of people being admitted to the hospitals.”
I have not seen the ‘unbelievable’ admission numbers to which Zucker is referring to and would love to see the memos he was getting. Data from the SPARCS database (below) show no such thing.1 The same is true for Elmhurst’s data, regardless of source.2
Zucker continued:
“But a few days before [the March 25 directive] was drafted, the modelers came back with what is going to happen. So the governor asked for the public health expert modeling teams that were consultants to provide us with where this was going, and they predicted up to 136,000 people would be in the hospital [statewide] at peak, which was X number of weeks away. I don’t remember, four, six weeks away from where we were at that point.”
I believe Zucker when he says modelers were portending doom and were driving officials’ perception of what would or could happen. (Lab leak enthusiast Alex Washburne was apparently one of those consultants.)3
Does Zucker (or do the members of the Select Subcommittee) now realize that the modeling inputs were deeply flawed and had no basis in reality? Is it possible dependence on projections – and use thereof to compel obedience from the public – resulted in ‘needing’ to apply data engineering feats to show death event that did not occur as presented in real time?
I don’t know for sure but if I’m able to see some ways it could have been accomplished – and accompanied by similar feats elsewhere – surely it wasn’t beyond the imagination or skill of “consultants,” military personnel, and/or intelligence agencies.
Zucker also said:
“And when I looked at the rate at which people were going to the hospital it made sense that we could end up there. And at that point, we also had, around this same time, a crisis at Elmhurst Hospital, where they had about 234 positive people in the hospital with COVID out of their 400-or-so beds, and 13 had died in one 24-hour period. And the hospitals were getting overwhelmed.”
The rate at which people were going to hospitals in New York City was not overwhelming – including at Elmhurst.⁶ I would love to see what Zucker was looking at and what he means by “the rate.”
Data I obtained from HHC do corroborate the “13 deaths in a one 24-hour period” claim for Elmhurst, but also show day after day of much higher numbers, with a peak of 31 deaths in a single day at the hospital.
Like Lincoln Medical Center (another HHC hospital), Elmhurst’s morgue capacity is 14 decedents and the decedent “turnover” rates for March and April 2020 defy credulity from a body management standpoint.
Neither at this point nor anywhere else in the full interview transcript do I see Dr. Zucker say anything about the handling of bodies. Why he would cite the “13 deaths in a day” number” with no reference to the cataclysm in the days that followed is strange when discussing a need to make room for incoming patients.
Finally, in the featured except, Zucker said:
“Greater New York Hospital Association called the governor and the team – we were all there in a conversation; a lot of us were there – and said that we have individuals who are better, they have recovered, and they are just sitting in a hospital bed but they need to go “home,” quote “home” for those who are in long-term care facilities or the other ones would just go home. And the long-term care facilities were not going to take them and that we needed to do something, which generated this document…”
Nothing I’ve read in Zucker’s testimony or the Select Subcommittee’s report thus far changes my view on the relationship between the 25 March 2020 nursing home directive and the death toll in New York City (articulated in the first paragraphs of this article):
New York City hospitals have evaded federal investigation thus far. The fact that they received a considerable amount of federal funds for the spring 2020 event makes this somewhat unsurprising but disturbing nevertheless.
I have more questions about why care home residents were brought to hospitals in the first place and why, after nearly five years, we still have no idea how many of the 38,000+ people who died in the biggest non-war mass casualty event in city history were nursing/long-term care facility residents, irrespective of cause or setting of death.
I doubt Howard Zucker knows either…but someone does.
Footnotes
- Shown and probed in When Were New Yorkers Who Died as Hospital Inpatients in Spring 2020 Admitted to the Hospital–and Why Does it Matter? ↩︎
- See Discrepancies Between Monthly & Quarterly Elmhurst ED Visits as Reported via SPARCS and HHC ↩︎
- 18 March 2026: I replaced a tweet by Washburne with a more comprehensive account authored by him, which I had not seen until this week. ↩︎
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