Table of Content
- Daily Newsletters
- Levine pressed for answers on Pa.’s missing nursing home data as confirmation advances
- Rachel Levine was criticized over handling of coronavirus pandemic
- More than half of all COVID-19 deaths reported in Pennsylvania have come from nursing homes
- Biden HHS nominee moved mother out of care facility as she directed nursing homes to take COVID patients
- Biden ignores Levine’s nursing home scandal, touts transgender qualifications
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.
Levine said the numbers of nursing home and long-term care facility cases is proportional to the population density of the counties where they are located, and cited academic research that backs up her theory about how the coronavirus got inside the homes. It asks Beam, who was selected by Gov. Tom Wolf to replace Levine in late January, to answer questions about how the state inspected nursing homes throughout the pandemic and how the department helped facilities manage infection control problems. That letter cites Spotlight PA reports from early in the pandemic about why the state did not act faster to implement strike teams to tackle nursing home outbreaks, and how the pandemic exacerbated long-standing problems with state oversight of facilities. Collins said Levine had assured her that Pennsylvania had not, like New York, undercounted nursing home deaths. But, also citing the Spotlight PA report, Collins questioned why so much data still appeared to be missing. "I cannot allow residents in a red county to get sick because their local officials can't see the invisible risk of the virus in their community," Wolf said in a press release.
Daily Newsletters
According to a Spotlight PA report, there continues to be missing data for more than 100 of the state’s 693 nursing homes, reported weekly by the state’s health department. Reporting further indicates Pennsylvania didn’t act fast enough to implement strike teams to confront nursing home outbreaks and how the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated longstanding problems with state oversight of the facilities. Dr. Levine, Pennsylvania’s former health secretary signed an order on March 18, 2020, for the state’s nursing homes to accept patients who previously had or were hospitalized with the coronavirus. The decision led to more than 12,000 senior deaths, accounting for more than half of Pennsylvania’s total. Several states reported COVID-19 outbreaks at nursing homes and long-term care facilities in the early days of the pandemic. In August, the Department of Justice asked governors in states that implemented such orders, including Pennsylvania and New York, to submit data on whether they may have contributed to nursing home deaths.
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Levine pressed for answers on Pa.’s missing nursing home data as confirmation advances
At one time, movies had a story line that you could easily follow because it was a familiar tale. With the advent of Marvel ‘movies’ crazy wild action scenes replace the need for story lines and the viewer is required to suspend not only disbelief but also rational thought as he is mesmerized by the flashing light, thunderous music and loud explosions. As to the people doing the ‘signing’ whenever speeches are being made? They are there as a distraction to keep people unaware of what’s truly being said….that’s my theory anyways…. The governor maintains that if the state were to re-open too soon, and the virus comes roaring back, eight weeks of sacrifice and self-exile would have been wasted. Sign up now to get the Washington Examiner’s breaking news and timely commentary delivered right to your inbox.
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
People have been crossing state and county lines to circumvent taxes and other burdens since the first warlod fiefdom was established. Mass. residents have been going to the Reservation casino in Conn. for decades. I don’t recall it, but it’s the kind of thing he would have done and bully for him if he did! He was already out of office when I was up in New England doing some work for a company he´d recently sold.
Biden HHS pick Rachel Levine would make history as first openly transgender Senate-confirmed federal official. Levine defended her decision in a press conference last May by saying she complied with her mother's requests to be removed and that her mother is "more than competent to make her own decisions." Currently, there are more than 777,000 coronavirus positive cases in Pennsylvania. Critics, including Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano and State Rep. Seth Grove, called out Levine for her handling of the virus, with some demanding her resignation. A month later, it appears government officials should have heeded the dire call to pursue different pandemic emergency plans.
More than half of all COVID-19 deaths reported in Pennsylvania have come from nursing homes
The letter also asks Beam to explain how the department will improve facility inspection procedures, how it will support ongoing vaccination efforts in nursing homes, and how it will ensure an adequate supply of personal protective equipment moving forward. In a June 18 letter, the health department said nursing home administrators could face daily fines or prison time if they did not comply with reporting requirements. But in September, the health department did not respond to questions about whether any state penalties had been issued. On Tuesday, he announced Dr. Rachel Levine, Pennsylvania's current secretary of health who has been helping lead the state's response to coronavirus, as his pick. If confirmed, Levine would be the first transgender federal official. But what has been unleashed in nursing homes literally killed that possibility.
That would be wonderful news for seniors in those facilities and their loved ones. Staff members who carry the virus without showing symptoms all too often bring the disease into the homes, with deadly results. New Jersey had 3,200 residents of long-term care homes die due to complications from the virus, about 40% of the statewide total. The Pennsylvania attorney general has reportedly opened a criminal investigation of several facilities in the wake of the rising death toll. “My mother requested, and my sister and I as her children complied, to move her to another location during the COVID-19 outbreak,” said Levine, according to ABC27.
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.
Over half of the 24,000 COVID-19-related deaths in Pennsylvania have occurred among nursing home staff and residents. Cuomo has been accused of omitting data to hide the full extent of COVID-19-related nursing home deaths in New York. Levine’s nomination advanced out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Wednesday by a vote of 13-9. If confirmed by the full Senate, Levine would be the first openly transgender woman to hold a high position in a presidential administration. The state attorney general's office announced last month it had opened a criminal investigation into several nursing homes, related to neglect of patients and residents.
More recent versions of the reports contain data that is self-reported by nursing homes directly to the state health department using other software portals — not the electronic death reporting system as stated by Levine during the confirmation hearing. The state first started releasing weekly reports with cumulative data on resident deaths, resident cases, and staff cases for each nursing facility in May. That disclosure came after weeks of pressure from advocacy groups representing nursing home residents and families. There is no evidence to support Greene's claim that Levine placed coronavirus-positive patients in nursing home facilities, thus likely contributing "to the thousands of elderly deaths in Pennsylvania."
Levine, who oversaw the state health department during the first year of the pandemic, was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as assistant health secretary. Outbreaks in Pennsylvania long-term care facilities make up nearly 70 percent of the state's coronavirus-related deaths and 21 percent of the state's positive cases of the virus. In her response, Levine pointed to lags in the state’s electronic death reporting system, or EDRS, and said slow uploads to that system explained why data outlining cases and deaths in nursing homes appeared incomplete. In August, the Justice Department, under then-President Donald Trump, sent a letter to the governors of Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan and New Jersey to provide data on whether they violated federal law by ordering nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients from hospitals.
