Table of Content
As of March 10, the most recent report available on the state health department website, case and death data was missing for 138 facilities. The previous week, data was missing for 133 facilities, according to a March 4 report. Facilities contacted by Spotlight PA in the fall said that they were in fact meeting reporting requirements but could not explain why their data was not included in the state’s weekly reports. Others were frustrated that they reported their data correctly, but it still showed up with errors in the public-facing reports.
The Round the Clock Diner, in Wolf’s home county of York, defiantly opened its doors and is serving dine-in customers against the rules of the red phase. Governor Wolf continued to take fire Tuesday, mostly from Republican elected officials, over his decisions on what counties and businesses can or cannot reopen. Many in Harrisburg wondered what kind of message it sends — when a close relative of the person tasked with overseeing those types of facilities doesn’t choose to stay in one. Levine countered that she is working to protect the health of all Pennsylvanians.
Daily Newsletters
Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results. I believe I’ve identified a main player in my own county who was born overseas and graduated from schools on the Left Coast. This person was appointed as county health director in 2017 and acts as a buzzkill whenever good news breaks in our area.
Nothing you said in this article demonizes the efforts of the governor and health secretary. I fail to see why a resident of a home exercising her legal right to move to another facility is an “abuse of power”. Anyone who wants to leave a nursing home is legally permitted to do so. They didnt have enough capacity to test every person in every facility daily and still dont, so they are doing it weekly. All nursing home facilities now have sufficient stocks of personal protective equipment, Levine said.
Levine pressed for answers on Pa.’s missing nursing home data as confirmation advances
Levine said these discrepancies could be explained because of "lag time" between when a death was reported to when it hit Pennsylvania’s electronic death reporting system . Former PennsylvaniaHealth Secretary Rachel Levine faced tough questioning Thursday during a Senate confirmation hearing regarding reported discrepancies in state records on COVID-related nursing home deaths. Editorial media includes use as a visual reference to support your article, story, critique or educational text. Personal use allows you to make a single personal print, card or gift for non-commercial use.
State Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine announced new guidance for those facilities on Tuesday to include more resources, education, and mass testing. Levine's problems bear a resemblance to those of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Indeed, the Republican letter said, "Pennsylvania had a similar policy to New York state early on during the pandemic that required nursing homes to admit or readmit infected patients regardless of whether those facilities were prepared to sequester infected patients." Levine faced criticism over the policy, which directed long-term care facilities and nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients who were unable to return home or who had lived at the facilities prior to their hospitalization. The guidance noted, "this may include stable patients who have had the COVID-19 virus."
Rachel Levine was criticized over handling of coronavirus pandemic
During Dr. Levine’s Senate confirmation hearing, Republican members grilled her on the missing numbers — must be Ms. Psaki wasn’t paying too close attention to the Senate hearings. Levine will become the first openly transgender federal official if confirmed by the Senate. The Legislature is scheduling a vote on a resolution calling on Levine to resign (sponsored by State Rep. Russ Diamond, R-Lebanon). Pittsburgh’s Mayor Bill Peduto responded with a hissy fit, boycotting his appearance not on Griffin’s show but another KDKA show. For LGBTQ Pride Month, his activist city officials imposed their sexual beliefs on police, forcing Steel City cops to adorn their vehicles with giant rainbow decals, despite objections by the police union. “This may include stable patients who have had the COVID-19 virus,” according to a copy of the guidelines.
A few months after this guidance was issued, Levine made the decision to remove her 95-year-old mother from a personal care home while coronavirus nursing home-related deaths were increasing. Of the state’s 3,806 coronavirus deaths, 2,611 had occurred in nursing homes and long-term-care facilities, according to ABC27. In March, Levine ordered long-term care facilities in the state to continue to accept coronavirus patients who had been discharged from hospitals but unable to return to their homes, the Bucks County Courier Times reported.
More than half of all COVID-19 deaths reported in Pennsylvania have come from nursing homes
The Biden-Harris transition has emphasized the incoming administration's plans to combat the coronavirus pandemic. President-elect Biden has set a goal to deliver 100 million coronavirus vaccine doses within his first 100 days in office. In fact, 30 staff members at the Philadelphia Nursing Home alone have tested positive for the virus, according to the city, which owns the 402-bed facility.
Levine pointed to lags in the state’s electronic death reporting system, or EDRS, to explain why case and death data appeared to be incomplete. Levine said the Department of Health will continue the outreach made in these facilities and begin introducing mass testing to the state. She emphasized plans to test all staff and residents at these facilities so that they can be congregated and treated. WHILE YOU’RE HERE… If you learned something from this story, pay it forward and become a member of Spotlight PA so someone else can in the future at spotlightpa.org/donate. These problems do not appear to have been corrected in the most recent reports, which are posted to the state department of health website. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) said Levine had assured her that Pennsylvania had accurately reported deaths in these homes, unlike New York, where the attorney general found that the Cuomo administration had undercounted fatalities by the thousands.
Finally, as alluded to earlier, an added problem is that the excessively high deaths in nursing homes are inflating the overall COVID-19 fatality rate in Pennsylvania, which currently stands as the nation’s fourth highest. If comparing fatality rates outside of nursing homes, however, Pennsylvania’s numbers fare much better. That lower rate is a great credit to top health-care providers like the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Penn Medicine and Allegheny Health Network . And yet, one wouldn’t know that from the overall state numbers, jacked up as they are by nursing homes. The inflated numbers are a disservice to what the likes of UPMC and Penn and AHN are truly doing, and quite heroically.
There is also a lot of times when the speaker continues bu the interpreter just comes to a pause, sometimes for up to a minute before resuming and you have to wonder, were they all caught up or do they deliberately drop out chunks of what’s being said for another reason? Once you notice this, you can’t help but see it happen again and again. I wish I knew someone with a real knowledge of ASL to compare what’s being said with the interpretation.
“My mother requested and my sister and I, as her children, complied to move her to another location during the COVID-19 outbreak,” Levine confirmed in a press conference. In Pennsylvania, about 65% of coronavirus deaths [now closer to 70%] were nursing-home residents, and in counties in the hardest hit southeastern part of the state, long-term care residents account for as much as 80% of county deaths. On March 29, as Pennsylvania, New York and other states began ordering nursing homes to admit medically stable residents infected with the coronavirus, national trade groups warned it could unnecessarily cost more lives. In a half-hour interview that focused on the state's handling of the pandemic's effects on nursing homes, Levine conceded that full "baseline" testing of all staff and residents in the 694 nursing homes, now expected to be finished by late July, has gone too slowly.
If confirmed, Dr. Levine will hold the second-highest position at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing the nation’s coronavirus response. The Biden administration likes to tout she would be the first openly transgender woman to be confirmed by the U.S. Moreover, reports from the state indicate that there’s been official undercounting of nursing home deaths — exactly the same crime New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been accused of. Pennsylvania health official moved mother from nursing home as deaths skyrocketed. Dr. Rachel Leland Levine , is the emotionally disturbed assistant secretary of health in the Biden regime.
"So, I must, and I will impose consequences if a county locally lifts restrictions when it has not yet been given the go-ahead by the state." The Justice Department’s inquiry remains open; however, the status of the investigation is unclear under the new Biden administration. This month, Pennsylvania Republicans announced an investigation into Democratic Gov. Tom Wolfe’s administration handling of the state’s nursing home policy. She assumed her current position of state health secretary in 2018 and has been working to respond to the state's coronavirus needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment