Over 22,500 COVID-19 deaths in U.S. may have resulted from transferring patients from hospitals to nursing homes

By Kent R. Kroeger (August 18, 2020)

Woman in a medical mask on the street during the coronavirus epidemic in Russia (Photo supplied by https://www.vperemen.com; Used under under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

The data used in this essay can be found here: GITHUB

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”
— Queen Gertrude, Act III, Scene II of Hamlet

In the past few weeks, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s rhetoric attacking the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus has noticeably escalated.

“This was a colossal blunder, how this COVID was handled by this government,” Cuomo said in an August 3rd press conference. “The worst government blunder in modern history.”

Not stopping there, Cuomo compared the coronavirus pandemic to the Vietnam War (not a bad comparison in my opinion) and capped off his partisan broadside with a gasping “shame on all of you” directed at the entire Trump administration.

Even the normally Cuomo-deferential New York media couldn’t help but notice Cuomo’s pointed hyperbole coincided with a growing examination by the New York state legislature (and a small number of journalists) of Cuomo’s decision early in the pandemic to push for the transfer of elderly COVID-19 patients in hospitals to nursing home facilities.