ALBANY, N.Y. — There have been calls for an independent state investigation of New York's nursing home policy.
Now there's a push for a federal one as well.
Representative Elise Stefanik says New York's entire GOP congressional delegation is demanding the feds look into the policy that required nursing homes to accept residents who had tested positive for COVID-19.
More than 5,300 New Yorkers have died at nursing homes around the state.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office says the state followed federal health department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and called the push for a probe "political pandering and fear-mongering."
In late March, the state health department issued a memo to nursing homes, ordering them to accept patients from hospitals, even they had the virus.
This resulted in a firestorm when infections and deaths within nursing homes, which house the population most endangered by the virus, subsequently began to soar.
Following an outcry, Governor Cuomo then recently reversed the order, allowing nursing home to refuse those intakes.
“Now, with the new governor’s order that allows nursing homes and long-term acute care facilities to refuse to accept patients who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 back into their facility, that's going to increase the number of (hospital) admissions,” Erie County health commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein told 2 On Your Side.
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