The Homa Files

We’ve been on this case for awhile.

• See I made the same mistake that Gov. Cuomo is making … but, in my defense, I was only 9 years old at the time.

Today’s WSJ  laid out the case that:

New York leaders’ coronavirus response was marred by missed warning signs and policies that put residents at greater risk and led to unnecessary deaths.

The virus has hit New York harder than any other state, cutting through its densely populated urban neighborhoods and devastating the economy.

New York state’s death toll accounts for 27% of American deaths.

Here are the WSJ’s supporting conclusions…

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• Improper patient transfers. Much has been reported about nursing homes being forced to readmit Covid patients.  Other infected patients, some near death,  were transferred between hospitals, often without documentation of prior diagnoses and treatment.

• Insufficient isolation protocols. Hospitals often mixed infected patients with the uninfected, and the virus spread, cross-infecting non-Covid units.

• Inadequate staff planning. Hospitals added hundreds of intensive-care beds but didn’t have enough trained staff to treat patients in those beds.

• Reinserting infected staff.   Given staff shortages and shifting gov’t guidelines, exposed and ill front-line workers were returned to work prematurely.

• Ventilator tunnel-vision. While leaders focused attention on procuring ventilators, hospitals didn’t always provide for adequate supplies of critical resources including oxygen, vital-signs monitors and dialysis machines.

The government and hospital action plans failed to procure enough equipment including IV pumps that control medicine flow, and dialysis machines — even though  it was evident from Chinese data that, besides respiratory and cardiac complications,  kidney failure was a main issue Covid-19 patients face.

• Paucity of local “ownership”.  Underprepared hospitals turned to the underprepared city, the city turned to the underprepared state and the state turned to the Federal government. Coordination often took a backseat to finger-pointing.

The entire article is worth reading.

This entry was posted on June 12, 2020 at 10:00 am and is filed under Coronavirus - Covid 19, Cuomo, Andrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.