When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration learned last year that the federal government was about to release data on Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes, state officials were concerned: Would the federal numbers tell the public a different story than the state’s own?
In a previously unreported call last June, New York officials pressed Robert Redfield, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Seema Verma, then administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for details on the coming data release, according to former Trump administration officials familiar with the call.
New York state had reported about 6,000 nursing-home deaths by the time of the call, but that figure excluded residents who died in hospitals. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, and Linda Lacewell, the head of the New York State Department of Financial Services, asked whether the federal data reflected those out-of-facility deaths, one of the former officials said.
“The big issue was where the patient died,” the official said.
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