arrow Emergency medical workers arrive at Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn in April of 2020. The nursing home had the highest number of presumed coronavirus-related deaths in the city. John Minchillo/AP/Shutterstock
New York state nursing homes are experiencing 50 percent more deaths than figures reported by the state health department, according to a report released Thursday by Attorney General Letitia James. Separately, health officials published new data showing that medical staff at these facilities appear to be passing on COVID-19 vaccines despite being first in line.
Since the start of the pandemic, the New York State Department of Health has reported 8,711 deaths among residents at long-term care facilities. That number accounts only for the people who died at the facilities themselves. If a resident with COVID-19 symptoms was sent to a hospital and passed away there, they were not counted in the long-term facilities death toll, as Gothamist reported in
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Starting today,
indoor dining will again be closed across New York City. Less than two and a half months after restaurants were allowed to open their dining rooms at reduced capacity, surging hospitalizations for Covid-19 prompted Gov. Andrew Cuomo to order the new shutdown.
arrow Jeanne-Marie Abinatti stands outside her salon on December 5, 2020 Gwynne Hogan / WNYC
Marcia Moreno still had her suitcases packed. She’d planned to visit family in Costa Rica, though those plans were put on hold indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 84-year-old had immigrated to Staten Island from Costa Rica in her twenties and raised her family in the borough’s New Dorp neighborhood.
“She was gonna go,” said her 59-year-old daughter Anayancy Houseman. “She loved to travel.”
Moreno was living alone and diligently isolating for most of the pandemic, her daughter said. But she fell in October, and was sent to a rehab facility where she was diagnosed with COVID in late November. She was transferred to Staten Island University Hospital a few days later.