More Than 6,000 Recovering Patients Returned to Nursing Homes During Height of Pandemic in N.Y.

An estimated 6,326 nursing home residents were returned to nursing homes while recovering from virus infections during the height of the pandemic in New York, but state health officials said the patients weren't the main cause of rising case numbers in long-term-care facilities.

According to a report released Monday by the New York State Department of Health, employees at these facilities and visitors were mostly responsible for spreading the virus among residents as case numbers rose throughout the state in March and April. Though visitors were barred from entering nursing homes in mid-March because of the virus threat, staff continued going to work every day to look after the residents in their care.

​"The data shows that the nursing home residents got COVID from the staff—and presumably also from those who visited them," New York Commissioner of Health Howard Zucker said during a Monday news briefing.

Before May 10, nursing home residents who were in recovery after testing positive for the virus and receiving treatment were returned to their facilities. Though that directive was changed on May 10, Cuomo said health officials now know the virus had likely stopped shedding in those patients by the time most of them returned to their facilities, meaning it was unlikely they had infected others.

"Based on the most cautious current provisions, most patients readmitted to nursing homes were likely not infectious, for the time they were being readmitted would have far exceeded the CDC standard," the report said, referring to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New York health department officials conducted their research based on virus case and fatality data that nursing home facilities provided the state. According to the department, an estimated 101,518 residents lived in 613 facilities throughout New York. Data from the nursing homes showed at least 509 facilities reported coronavirus infections, with at least 6,432 resident deaths confirmed.

An official with the state Department of Health told Newsweek all nursing home facilities currently operating in New York contributed to the data used in the department's report.

Meanwhile, state health officials said nearly 24 percent of all staff at long-term-care facilities—about 37,500 of the 158,000 workers—tested positive for the virus. The rising case numbers among staff members correlated with the rising numbers of cases among residents through the spring, officials said.

"Of the 37,500 nursing home staff infected, nearly 7,000 of them were working in facilities in the month of March; during the same period, more than a third of the state's nursing home facilities had residents ill with the virus," the report said.

In early May, Governor Andrew Cuomo required all staff at nursing homes to be tested for the virus twice every week, an effort to catch infections early before residents could be exposed to employees who were positive. Both the governor and state health officials said information the federal government provided about asymptomatic individuals prior to that testing mandate—which suggested asymptomatic individuals could not transmit the virus to others—made the problem worse.

"This early, and ultimately erroneous, understanding of viral spread allowed many nursing home COVID-positive employees to continue working," the report said.

Health officials said receiving more information about the virus early on would have helped them devise alternate strategies for protecting the state's nursing home population. "If states had accurate information about COVID transmission at an earlier time and had the testing capacity to detect asymptomatic but infected individuals, other procedures might have been taken," the report said.

Mount Sinai Hospital's president and CEO, David Reich, said in a news release that a report hospital researchers published last week showed that asymptomatic individuals were spreading the virus throughout the state—and likely in nursing homes—weeks before the first cases were reported in New York in early March.

"The conclusions of the NYSDOH report of the root causes of nursing home fatalities in New York State are well supported by the data detailing nursing home staff COVID-19 illness," Reich said.

Nursing home communities have been an area of concern throughout the pandemic as high numbers of staff and residents tested positive for the virus across the country. According to a report last month in The New York Times, about 43 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. were connected to nursing home outbreaks.

This article has been updated to include information from the New York State Department of Health on the number of facilities included in its latest report on COVID-19 in nursing homes.