From CBS6:

ALBANY NY (WRGB) – The Secretary to the Governor says the State is making changes after a CBS 6 investigation on COVID-19 in group homes.

A whistleblower told CBS 6’s Anne McCloy they had concerns the State wasn’t doing enough to stop the spread.

So far, there have been 2,111 cases and 345 deaths in the State’s more than 7,200 group homes for the disabled. Last week, Governor Cuomo told Anne he would check into the policy.

Wednesday we followed up, and Anne asked Cuomo about the controversy surrounding the State’s handling of nursing homes.

Anne: “There are 7,200 groups that house disabled people in the State. The staff are telling me they are seeing cross-contamination because of how short-staffed these homes are. They fear this is creating another situation like what we’ve seen in the nursing homes.”

CBS 6 brought these concerns to the governor’s attention again Wednesday, after multiple care workers who work under the NYS Office for People with Developmental Disabilities contacted us, saying the agency was so short-staffed it had been floating care workers from homes with COVID-19 to homes with no cases.

Whistleblower Jeff Monsour says he put the State on notice about the threat months ago. He works in OPWDD group homes.

“When the COVID-19 crisis came about, they continued the floating policy,” Monsour said.

Anne followed up with the governor. Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa responded.

Anne: You said you would check the policy. Did you have a chance to check it and will you make policy changes to protect people in these group homes?

DeRosa: The moving around of staff is something they do if it’s absolutely last resort, if there’s a staff shortage, if people are out because they’re sick and they need to have certain people with certain skill levels step-in to be able to cover, and so that is something that has had to happen up until this point. However, after you raised the issue last week, we’ve been having internal discussions about supplementing with the volunteer portal so that we don’t do that and so we keep people more restricted to the homes that they work in to address this very issue. We are also doing temperature checks, we’re looking at a whole host of other things that we’re going to implement.

Anne also asked Cuomo about a controversial March directive that allowed COVID-positive patients to be admitted back into New York State nursing homes, which have now seen thousands of deaths due to the virus.

Anne: There is a call for a federal probe into how the State handled the nursing home situation.

Gov. Cuomo: I’m not going to get into the political back-and-forth, but anyone who wants to ask why did the State do that with COVID patients in nursing homes, it’s because the State followed President Trumps’s CDC guidance, so they should ask President Trump.

Lawmakers who have called for a federal probe believe the State is not giving accurate numbers to make deaths from nursing homes appear to be less than they actually are.

Cuomo told Anne, “no numbers were changed”.

He also gave some explanation for the March directive during the briefing, saying that at the time the directive was made the government was focused on freeing up hospital beds for people who were in grave condition.

He explained some who were in the hospital who had tested positive, were not gravely ill and were waiting for a negative test. He also reiterated a point he’d made in the past, saying nursing homes were not to accept patients they couldn’t take care of.

“If the federal government wants to start a probe, then they can start a probe,” Cuomo said.

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