On Thursday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News Senior Meteorologist Janice Dean shared the story of losing her mother-in-law and father-in-law to COVID-19 in a New York City nursing home.
Dean is a largely apolitical figure on the Fox News channel but believes Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s advisory to send COVID-19 elders back into nursing homes is the reason her in-laws are gone. On March 25, Cuomo issued an advisory for hospitals to discharge elderly patients with COVID-19 back to nursing homes to combat alleged discrimination against those diagnosed with coronavirus.
Dean said she is shocked at how underreported this story is. This an intentional policy that has major consequences for elderly people and their families across not only New York, but other states as well.
“I have not seen the coverage of this. You’ve covered it, Martha [McCallum] covered it, the New York Post has covered it. This should be one of the biggest stories of this pandemic, of 2020. Twenty percent of our lost loved ones are from nursing homes. And, it’s because Governor Cuomo, and several other Governors, by the way, in different states, forced COVID-recovering patients into nursing homes,” Dean said.
Dean explains how her father-in-law was transferred to a new floor in his nursing home, out of the blue, and contracted COVID-19. He passed away three hours after nurses discovered he had the virus.
“A week before [my husband’s] dad died, they called [my husband] to tell him they were moving [his dad] to another floor. And I believe that floor was used for recovering COVID patients. I can’t prove that, we can’t get any confirmation on any of this,” Dean said.
Dean also noted the family did not find out that her father-in-law died of COVID-19 until the death certificate was handed to them. Dean’s husband got a call saying his dad “wasn’t feeling well,” and three hours later his father passed away.
The death of Dean’s mother-in-law exemplifies another flaw in the way New York City counts death by coronavirus. According to Dean, her mother-in-law was rushed to the hospital after exemplifying COVID symptoms and on her death certificate she was declared dead in a hospital, not in a nursing home, where she contracted the virus.
The disease has plagued nursing home and elderly care facilities in a disproportionate manner, killing upwards of 10,500 residents and staff in such facilities nationwide. That’s nearly one-fifth of the U.S. coronavirus death total. Cuomo’s decision to allow nursing homes to continue caring for COVID-19 patients is to blame for a large portion of this atrocity.
Cuomo has been championed by the mainstream media for his response to the coronavirus pandemic in New York City, but his state-wide response to nursing homes deserves anything but the glowing praise he’s received. The Dean family’s tragic loss exposes Cuomo’s shoddy job as governor of New York during the coronavirus pandemic.
