State Undercounts Harlem Nursing Home Deaths: Report

HARLEM, NY — New York State may be undercounting the number of coronavirus deaths at a Harlem Nursing Home that has been hit hard by the deadly virus in the past month, according to reports.

Neighbors of the Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation recorded at least 20 corpses being removed from the West 138th Street facility in videos acquired by the New York Daily News. The bodies, wrapped in black bags, are taken out of the nursing home and placed in vans or trucks before being transported to an unknown destination, according to the report.

What residents are seeing unfold at the nursing home contradicts the state's count of deaths at the facility. The state's latest release of nursing home data reveals just two confirmed coronavirus deaths and three presumed coronavirus deaths at the Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation. At five total deaths, the facility has the least amount of fatalities out of the Manhattan nursing homes listed on the state's dataset.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo revealed an additional 1,700 nursing home coronavirus deaths this week, brining the state's total count of nursing home deaths up to 4,813. For the first time, the state's data included people believed to have been killed by the coronavirus before their diagnoses could be confirmed by a lab test. The state does not count nursing home residents who were transferred to hospitals before dying as nursing home deaths.

During a Tuesday press conference, Cuomo said that the state's data may not accurately reflect the number of deaths at each nursing home. There are more than 600 nursing homes in the state, and the Department of Health will continue working to verify fatality numbers, Cuomo said.

An employee at the Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation said that a state mandate requiring nursing homes to take in coronavirus-positive patients may have contributed to deaths at the facility.

"The DOH did what no doctor would do. They took sick people out of hospitals and put them in nursing homes," the anonymous nursing home worker told a Daily News reporter, adding that there is "blood" on the hands of Cuomo and his administration.

Read the full New York Daily News report here.

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