Instead of denying or supplying responsive records, the New York City Office of the Medical Examiner has added another month to my (nearly) year-old request.
On 11 February 2025, I asked for the document “Biological Incident Fatality Surge Plan for Managing In and out of Hospital Deaths” published in 2015. and daily morgue census reported by all New York City hospitals for as long as this morgue census survey was active.
The full text of my request and all correspondence can be found here:
Even should OCME produce the morgue census data, I am regarding the delay itself as an admission that the survey results have not been stewarded properly and may not substantiate the magnitude or timing of the city’s spring 2020 overall death spike or 11-week hospital casualty event in which a reported ~22,000 patients died (255% above normal).
Per federal data (table below), city medical facilities saw seven weeks of fatalities well over 100% and quickly reached a 700% increase in four weeks. The ~16,000 “extra” decedents is the equivalent of five and a half times the reported ~2,800 deaths in the World Trade Center disaster in September 2001. Most of those deaths were on-site, of course, and were not handled in or by hospitals.
A request I submitted to OCME more than two years ago, in December 2023, is also still unfulfilled. I sent an email last week to the staffer who was handling that request but have not received a reply. The records I await from that FOIL follow:
- Number of cremation permit applications//requests received daily between 1/1/2018 – 12/22/2022
- Number of cremation permit applications//requests approved daily 1/1/2018 – 12/22/2022
- Number of autopsies performed weekly by the OCME between 1/1/2018 and 12/31/2022. Use zero (0) for any weeks in which zero autopsies were conducted
- Underlying cause of death determination for all deaths for which OCME determined cause of death for deaths occurring between 10/1/2019 and 12/31/2022. Please provide the determinations and data in a weekly format, if possible.
- All directives, orders, reports, memos, emails, and/or presentations that explain or mention the OCME’s processing of 12,663 deaths during the week of April 26th, 2020 – May 2, 2020.
These requests stem from data I obtained via OCME in 2023 that show a three-day, 11,000-death processing event, which has not been explained or accounted for.
Other updates:
- NYC Department of Health granted my appeal and released the data I asked for regarding probable deaths. I anticipate writing about those records in February.
- Tomorrow I am meeting (virtually) with Senator James Skoufis from New York to speak about nursing home resident death data.
- More broadly, I’m still trying to get a federal agency, HHS, to disclose any in-progress efforts toward reconciling, or otherwise recognize the need to report, total numbers and time-series data for nursing home resident deaths in 2020.
- I am also waiting on FEMA to sort out and supply additional data from a request I made in 2024 regarding COVID funeral assistance for eight other counties, so that I can compare it with what I found for those data in New York City.
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