New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday said the public has to get the ''full truth'' on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes after the state’s attorney general said the number was undercounted by as much as 50 percent.
"We have to make sense of this, we have to get the full truth and have to make sure it never ever happens again, nothing like this happens again and we have to be honest about the numbers," de Blasio said during a news conference.
''I do want to give a lot of credit to colleagues in my administration, our health leadership,'' he added. ''They've always strived to really put out not just the obvious numbers, but we've been talking about probable deaths and probable cases. I mean, we try to be as clear and honest as possible and I appreciate that. And I think that's the way we all have to understand this crisis and make sure nothing like that happens again.''
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been under fire for months over his nursing home policy and the true number of deaths in those facilities.
Letitia James’ office found that "a larger number of nursing home residents died from COVID-19 than the New York State Department of Health’s publishing nursing home data reflected and may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent."
Such an undercount would mean the state's tally of 8,711 nursing home deaths is actually more than 13,000.
New York State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker contested the report, claiming the department "has always publicly reported the number of fatalities within hospitals irrespective of the residence of the patient, and separately reported the number of fatalities within nursing home facilities and has been clear about the nature of that reporting."
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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