More “evidence of absence” for the New York City mass casualty event
Imagine writing an article about how your hospital system used innovative strategies to manage an unprecedented number of dead patients without saying how many patients were managed.
Hard to imagine, but that’s exactly what “Innovations in Fatality Management during the COVID-19 Pandemic” does.
Fifteen authors explain some of actions taken in New York City’s public hospital system, NYC Health + Hospitals Corporation (HHC) to handle and keep track of decedents during excess periods in 2020-2022. The introductory sentences don’t hold back [emphasis mine]:
“Of the innumerable challenges faced during the first surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, fatality management was among the most widely publicized. COVID-19 led to an unprecedented number of deaths in New York City—both in healthcare facilities and at home—taxing every aspect of the fatality management continuum.“
Given this rhetorically strong set-up, one would expect, at minimum, to see corroborative numbers on the event. Yet the article provides no descriptive statistics on the cataclysm reportedly experienced. Readers are left with no idea of how many bodies were handled — and therefore no way to evaluate the need for or appropriateness of the strategies described.
I’m reminded of Peter Drucker’s insight: “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”
The authors do report how many confirmed and probable “COVID” deaths there were during spring 2020, and provide a time-series graph based on NYC DOH data. But, besides being only a certain kind of deaths, these numbers are citywide and inclusive of all places of death (hospitals and nursing homes and personal residents, etc.).
Lead and corresponding author Inga Furuness wasn’t reachable at the email address provided but another author directed me to Laura Iaviocoli, Chief Medical Officer at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst Hospital. (Elmhurst was the “epicenter of the epicenter” hospital at the center of the New York Times’ and President Trump’s attention early on).
I emailed Dr Iaviocoli earlier this week but have not received a response. In addition to asking for raw numbers, I asked for comparative figures and about the presence of the New York National Guard at Elmhurst.1
Good day, Dr. Iavicoli.
I have questions related to the study “Innovations in Fatality Management during the COVID-19 Pandemic, on which you were a co-author. I tried contacting the lead and corresponding author, Dr. Furneses but the email was returned undelivered. Another author, Dr. McGinty, directed me to you.
I am hoping you or someone else on the team can address these queries:
1) I don’t see figures on the number of fatalities managed by HHC. Can you tell me how many decedents total HHC hospitals (n=11) and HHC care facilities (n=5) experienced between 1 March 2020 and 30 May 2020?
2) How does the total number of decedents during that “first wave” compare to what was normal at that time of year (pre-2020)?
3) How does the density or turnover in the last two weeks in March 2020 and first two weeks of April 2020 compare to the most number of decedents HHC hospitals had ever handled previously?
4) The study doesn’t mention Elmhurst Hospital receiving aid from the New York National Guard: https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article-View/Article/2206664/new-york-national-guard-pararescuemen-aid-queens-hospital/ Can you or someone on your team confirm that the NG team was involved in fatality management at Elmhurst, as well as the number of decedents they handled, and the number of days they were on site?
Thank you kindly for your assistance,
Jessica Hockett, PhD
Health + Hospitals Corporation previously provided me with bed occupancy data for Elmhurst for 2016 -2020 (reported here) and 2020 death data for all eleven hospitals (reported here) but denied records showing deaths in 2019 (reported here), plus other records I requested.2
If I hear from Dr. Iaviocoli, I will update this post. Until then, I’ve added her/her team to the list of researchers that has ignored or denied requests for data and information related to their published studies on the New York event.
- Added post-publication: According to a press release issued by Mayor DeBlasio’s office, “the federal government sent 291 military medical personnel to be dispatched to NYC Health+ Hospitals” on 4 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20231229152342/https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/226-20/as-city-fights-covid-19-mayor-de-blasio-new-yorkers-personnel-ventilators-personal Again, the “Innovations” article makes no explicit mention of military personnel, which would at least be unusual, if not particularly innovative. ↩︎
- I continue to transfer content from the Substack version of Wood House 76 to the WordPress version. All articles are saved as PDFs; most are on Internet Archive. ↩︎
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