NY 'undercounted' nursing home deaths

The New York State Health Department underreported the COVID-19 death toll in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent, the state's attorney general claimed on Thursday.

More nursing home residents died from the coronavirus than the health department's "published nursing home data reflected and may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent", Attorney General Letitia James' investigators concluded in a 76-page report.

Her office looked at 62 of the state's roughly 600 nursing homes. It reported 1,914 deaths of residents from COVID-19, while the state's health department counted 1,229 deaths at the same facilities.

The report said if that pattern exists statewide, it would mean the state is underreporting deaths by nearly 56 percent.

The true COVID-19 death toll of New York nursing home residents is closer to 13,000, as opposed to the 8,677 reported on Tuesday by the state health department, according to the investigation's findings.

There was no immediate response to the report from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, who has been criticized for waiting until May to reverse a state policy that required long-term care facilities to accept recovering patients who may still test positive for COVID-19.

The attorney general's office launched its investigation last spring after whistleblowers reported that residents who tested positive for the coronavirus were being placed with healthy residents and that the nursing homes were failing to adequately test workers and making "sick employees continue to work and care for residents or face retaliation or termination".

In July, the state health department released a report that sought to knock down the assertion that putting COVID-19 patients into nursing homes might have led to outbreaks. Instead, the report said that most of those patients "were no longer contagious when admitted and therefore were not a source of infection".

The report placed the blame for the more than 8,500 deaths of seniors on staffers who unwittingly infected residents.

New strain emerged

Meanwhile, South Carolina officials said on Thursday that they have detected two cases of a coronavirus variant that has emerged from South Africa, the first report of the strain detected in the US.

The state health department said that the cases involved no known travel to South Africa and no connection between the two patients, both adults, suggesting that the variant is circulating in the community. One patient was in the southern region of the state, and the other in the northeast.

"That's frightening," because it means there could be more undetected cases within the state, Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases physician at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, told The Associated Press. "It's probably more widespread."

The state health department said it had identified one case on Wednesday and was notified of a second case the same day by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The variant was originally identified in South Africa and has since been found in about 30 countries.

While the two vaccines now in use in the US, developed by Moderna and a partnership between Pfizer and BioNTech, appear to be protective against other variants, they may be somewhat less effective against the one found in South Africa.