Fox News’ Janice Dean finally got the opportunity to testify on New York’s disastrous nursing home policy after an attempt to silence her.
Dean lost both her in-laws in a New York nursing home, and directly blames Andrew Cuomo’s mandate for this completely avoidable and predictable tragedy. Dean was eager to share her testimony, and sent in her formal request early in the month.
However, just hours before the hearing, Dean was dropped from the list.
2) The only person that emailed me back was Republican assemblyman @Byrne4NY who not only passed on his condolences, requested repeatedly to his colleagues and fellow lawmakers that I be allowed to speak as someone who lost both in-laws to COVID 19 in NY eldercare facilities.
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) August 9, 2020
I was told over a week ago I would be welcome to testify at tomorrow's nursing home hearings in New York. A formal request was expected on Friday, but then all of a sudden I wasn't on the list anymore. The democrats didn't even have the decency to respond to me.
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) August 9, 2020
The reason her testimony was disallowed was that the Democrats would be too “uncomfortable with her testimony.” In other words, they didn’t want to be reminded the cost of their mistakes.
Unfortunately for their comfort levels, New York’s Republicans allowed her to speak yesterday.
According to Townhall:
“Mickey and Dee’s health had been declining for some time before they went into elder care facilities,} Dean explained. It was “the first time in their lives they had been apart like this.” Mickey’s facility went into quarantine in March and she was notified that he’d be moved to a different floor to make way for a new crop of patients. Dean says that she now believes that some of those new patients were ones recovering from COVID. Some days later the staff called her husband to notify him that his dad was sick. He had a fever, and three hours later he was dead. They were told it was likely a result of coronavirus.
“We only got confirmation when we saw it on the death certificate,” she said.
Dean recalls how her husband Sean had to break the news to his ailing mother. He would later visit her, but had to stand ten feet away with a mask on, telling her he loved her.
“He would never see her again,” Dean said as she choked up.
Dean said that her husband recalled how, in his mother’s facility, workers were getting coffee without masks on, and they were allowing residents to roam freely. The last thing Dee asked of her son before she died was to get Easter gifts for the kids and put her name on the presents.
“Elder care homes were turned into death traps.”
Her death was not counted as a nursing home death because she died in the hospital. New York, Dean fumed, is the only state who doesn’t count deaths in the proper way.
Watch below (begins approximately 37 minutes in):
As ProPublica notes in their June 16th report excoriating Cuomo’s policy: “In the weeks that followed the March 25 order, COVID-19 tore through New York state’s nursing facilities, killing more than 6,000 people — about 6% of its more than 100,000 nursing home residents.” Meanwhile, the Republican County Executive of Rensselaer County rightly saw Cuomo’s advice as absurd and defied it. The only nursing home run by the county, Van Renssealaer, saw a total of zero coronavirus deaths.
There are now 6,600 recorded nursing home deaths, and as if that isn’t bad enough, the true number of deaths could be nearly twice as many according to an Associated Press report. “New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes, already among the highest in the nation, could actually be a significant undercount. Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there,” their report reads.
In the face of all this, Cuomo assures the public that there’s no need for an independent inquiry into his nursing home policy.
