Inside The Nursing Home With NY's Most Coronavirus Deaths

GLEN OAKS, QUEENS — When Mary Ann Sudlow showed up at Long Island Jewish Medical Center one day in late April, she was dehydrated and her kidneys were failing. She had tested positive for the new coronavirus earlier that day at the rehabilitation center next door, where she was recovering from a hip replacement.

Six weeks before she ended up in a hospital ICU, the 85-year-old was seemingly healthy and living on her own. Then it became painful to walk. She landed in the operating room for surgery to replace her hip, then, on March 30, she moved to the Parker Jewish Institute for Health Care and Rehabilitation to recover.

What Sudlow's family didn't know was that, four days prior, Parker had reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Sudlow tested positive for the virus just under a month after arriving at Parker.

She was immediately transferred to Long Island Jewish, which is next to Parker but run independently. There, ICU doctors told her family it was only a matter of time. She died three days later.

Interviews with the families of four current or recent Parker residents, including Sudlow, paint a picture of a facility under siege amid the coronavirus pandemic, with too few protective measures, not enough health care workers and little-to-no communication about what's going on inside — claims the facility disputes.

To Sudlow's son, Michael, what happened can be summed up by a text message he got one day from his brother: "The nursing home is who killed mom."

The Parker Jewish Institute for Health Care and Rehabilitation dates back to 1907, when it was established as a homeless shelter for the elderly, according to its website.

The facility expanded into health care for the elderly in the 1970s and now runs a nursing home for long-term care, a rehabilitation center for shorter-term stays, a dialysis center and a medical transportation service.

It now has 527 beds and employs about 1,300 people, according to public tax records. (Though Parker straddles the border between Queens and Nassau Counties, and its address reads New Hyde Park, the state health department classifies it as a Queens facility.)

Now, the outbreak of the new coronavirus in New York has added a new chapter to Parker's century-long legacy: Of the 362 nursing homes across the state that have reported confirmed or presumed deaths due to the coronavirus, Parker has the highest number, according to an analysis of state health department data on deaths from March 1 to May 5.

Seventy-three Parker residents have died of the coronavirus as of May 5, the state data shows, though daily statistics posted to the facility's website indicate the current death toll is at least 75. The data includes residents who died after getting transferred to a hospital, according to a Parker spokesperson.

That means the virus has killed at least 15 percent of Parker's resident population, accounting for the 91-percent occupancy rate listed for the facility on the state health department's website.

Using that rate, Parker would be rank 12th on a list of New York City's hardest-hit nursing homes compiled by THE CITY.

Meanwhile, Parker keeps admitting patients who have already tested positive for the coronavirus due to a state directive prohibiting nursing homes from refusing to admit patients "solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19."

Vincent Iraci, whose mother contracted the virus at Parker, called the order a "death sentence." He has since moved his mother to a different nursing home, he told Patch.

Parker has admitted more than a dozen patients with COVID-19 since the beginning of the month, according to statistics posted to the facility's website.

As of Wednesday, Parker has 369 residents, a spokesperson for the nursing home told Patch. Roughly a third of the nursing home's population has tested positive for the virus.

Lina Scacco, Parker's vice president for corporate outreach and development, attributed its high death toll to the facility's size, the number of residents with advanced health conditions, starting to test for the virus earlier than other nursing homes, and deciding early on to classify all deaths of residents who had the virus as COVID-19 deaths.

"There is no data to suggest that Parker has experienced proportionally greater mortalities than other institutions," Scacco wrote in response to a list of emailed questions.

Parker's mission is "to provide with compassion and dedication superior quality health care and rehabilitation," according to tax filings. Its website says: "where excellence is the standard."

The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services classifies the facility as much above average in terms of the quality of care, and New York State Department of Health records show that the few issues reported at Parker were largely isolated, not systemic.

The four families interviewed by Patch said that image doesn't match up with their experiences.

Ricky Russo recalled how his mother, who has been a patient at Parker for 15 years, found out about the toll the coronavirus was taking on her home.

"All of a sudden, my mother calls me and said she's seen body bags roll by her room on a daily basis," Russo said in a phone interview.

Russo's mother tested negative for the coronavirus in late April, but her single room is down the hall from a cluster of residents who have the virus. She claims there were times that one nurse attended to both them and her — something the state health department has explicitly directed nursing homes not to do.

Scacco, the Parker spokesperson, said the facility is not experiencing a shortage of workers.

"We are in full compliance with the regulation, and isolating patients and residents with highly communicable disease is our standard operating practice," Scacco wrote in an emailed statement.

That isn't the impression Michael Camarda gets from his father, who has been at Parker since 2016 and is bedridden after suffering multiple strokes. His father has spent hours sitting in his own waste while waiting for someone to change him and doesn't get his medications on time. When Camarda called in early March to complain, a nurse who had been caring for his father said they were short-staffed.

Camarda said his father tested positive for the coronavirus at the beginning of April, after Parker started moving COVID-19 patients to his floor.

"He's in a private room, so the only way for him to come in contact with COVID is through a nurse or a doctor," Camarda said.

Angered by his father's situation, Camarda called a nursing home executive to complain and started posting publicly on Facebook about the facility. The executive asked him to take the posts down, but Camarda refused. He's now researching other nursing homes for his father.

"He believes he's going to die in there," Camarda said.

The four families who recounted their experiences to Patch said they have struggled to get in touch with staffers at Parker since visitors were barred mid-March, and that they were never notified when the facility confirmed its first case of the coronavirus.

Scacco, the spokesperson, said health privacy laws limit what they can share about COVID-19 cases with other residents and their families, even though the state health department says nursing homes are required to notify residents and their family members within 24 hours if any resident tests positive for the virus or dies from it.

As Russo's mother, who has so far avoided contracting the virus, told him, "They’re dropping left and right here and they’re not telling us anything."

The four families said they decided to go public with their experiences in an effort to get answers and to stand up for the home's many residents who can't speak for themselves.

"Someone needs to speak up for these people and let it be known what’s truly going on behind those doors," Camarda said.

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