A NY Times editorial about nursing home deaths ignores the most important thing
The trick when reading the mainstream media — which still carries weight with too many Americans — is to look for what's missing in an article. In the case of an editorial in the New York Times about the overwhelming number of nursing home deaths from the Wuhan virus, the piece manages to avoid mentioning even once New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the states that account for most of the nursing home deaths.
The Wuhan virus would have been just a bad flu season but for the number of nursing home residents who died from it. In June, the Times acknowledged that nursing homes were Ground Zero for virus deaths:
While 8 percent of the country's cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than 41 percent of the country's pandemic fatalities.
The numbers get worse when you consider that, as of October 2019, before the Wuhan virus hit, at most 1.5 million people, or a half a percent of the American population, lived in nursing homes.
The greatest number of nursing home deaths occurred in states that locked down their healthy citizens but mandated that nursing homes, in which the most vulnerable Americans lived, had to accept virus-infected patients. At the end of April 2020, when it was clear that the elderly were most at risk, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said of struggling nursing homes, "They don't have the right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that."
Three days later, Cuomo doubled down on the mandate. It's heartbreaking to read how desperate nursing home managers sought relief from Cuomo's deadly orders:
The CEO of a hard-hit Brooklyn nursing home, where 55 patients have died from the coronavirus, told The Post last week that he'd been warning state Health Department officials for weeks he had staffing and equipment issues — yet received little help.
"There is no way for us to prevent the spread under these conditions,'' the head of the Cobble Hill Health Center, Donny Tuchman, wrote in an e-mail to the department on April 8.
Pennsylvania's Governor Wolf, Michigan's Governor Whitmer, and New Jersey's Governor Murphy all followed the same pattern. The Department of Justice, which has opened an investigation into those states, provides the numbers for the slaughterhouses those governors created:
According to the Centers for Disease Control, New York has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, with 32,592 victims, many of them elderly. New York's death rate by population is the second highest in the country with 1,680 deaths per million people. New Jersey's death rate by population is 1,733 deaths per million people — the highest in the nation. In contrast, Texas's death rate by population is 380 deaths per million people; and Texas has just over 11,000 deaths, though its population is 50 percent larger than New York and has many more recorded cases of COVID-19 — 577,537 cases in Texas versus 430,885 cases in New York. Florida's COVID-19 death rate is 480 deaths per million; with total deaths of 10,325 and a population slightly larger than New York.
One can quibble about whether those who died were identified correctly as Wuhan virus deaths, but for now those are the available numbers, and they are damning. Four states were responsible for almost half of the Wuhan virus deaths in America.
Amazingly, the Times' editorial board managed to write a self-righteous piece about those 68,000 nursing home deaths without once mentioning New York, New Jersey, Michigan, or Pennsylvania or their governors. Instead, the article focused only on Texas, a red state that did not slaughter its elderly — or, indeed, any of its population.
At the same time, you will not be surprised to learn that the editorial board placed most of the blame on Trump, with some leftover blame on the nursing homes:
To be clear, responsibility for the nation's disastrous coronavirus response rests largely with the federal government — which left states, cities and institutions scrambling to set social distancing policies, secure equipment and effectively test and trace enough people to stop the virus from spreading. But in nursing homes, those broader failures have been compounded by several long-brewing problems of the industry's own making.
Some people are pushing back against the Times' narrative. On Saturday, New York City beachgoers saw a plane fly overhead with a banner stating, "THE GOV KILLED NANA."
'The gov killed Nana' banner flies over NYC, LI beaches https://t.co/uGwTcUIZxv
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) September 6, 2020
Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." When it comes to the Times, let's hope he's right.
Hat tip: Richard Baehr.
Image: Older woman with a younger woman from Pxhere, CC0 public domain.