A nursing home in Harlem has become a place of horrors for staff and residents. The disturbing videos and the grim scenes were all obtained by the Daily News and it showed at least 20 bodies wrapped in black bags that were carted out of the Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation over the last month during the coronavirus pandemic.
Was there a cover up?
The 20 bodies that were wrapped in black bags were piled into medical examiner vans and refrigerator trucks. However, only five people it is recorded to have died of COVID-19 in the nursing home on W. 138th St., according to the state.
The mysterious decrease in the number of deaths, which could not be explained by the state Health Department, raises questions about data on deaths at nursing homes shared by Governor Cuomo during one of his daily briefings.
Governor Cuomo said on May 5 that accurate reports from New York's 613 nursing homes and 544 adult care facilities are a work in progress. The state disclosed an additional 1,700 people at nursing homes who are said to have died from coronavirus. Because of this, the total number of death due to coronavirus is 4,813 since March 1.
The total number of deaths does not include residents who were transferred to a hospital before dying. Gov. Cuomo said that he would take all of the numbers with a grain of salt.
The video of bodies wrapped in body bags also raises questions about the Harlem Center, a 200-bed facility that is facing a lawsuit for allegedly letting the body of a resident decay for five days in a storage closet in December. A spokesman for the facility did not answer a question about how many people have died there during the coronavirus outbreak.
According to an employee, Harlem Center said that the home had received coronavirus patients from hospitals under a state mandate. A male medical professional said that the Department of Health forced them to take COVID-19 patients from hospitals. The DOH took sick people out of hospitals and put them in nursing homes.
Blood on the hands of Cuomo and the DOH
The data on deaths that are regularly updated by the Department of Health show two confirmed and three presumed COVID-19 deaths at Harlem Center. However, a second male worker at the facility gave the impression that the number of deaths was much higher than what was recorded.
The state Health Department launched an unannounced coronavirus inspection of the nursing home last week, according to a spokeswoman for the agency. Richard Brum, general counsel for the home's parent company Allure Group, said that there was nothing unique about the sudden inspection.
Brum said that the DOH visited Harlem Center last week as part of a routine COVID survey. They have not seen the results yet and there were no indications that it was done in response to the incident. Brum added that they have done everything in accordance with state and city regulations with respect to treating and reporting COVID-19 cases.
A state health official said that the investigations focus on compliance with CDC guidelines to prevent coronavirus infections. The investigation also includes an audit of records on coronavirus deaths.
