Albany – Staff at all nursing homes in New York will have to undergo coronavirus testing twice a week, authorities announced Sunday.
In addition, those facilities will stop receiving COVID-19 patients who are discharged from hospitals, announced Governor Andrew Cuomo.
New York City has been responding to allegations of racial disparities in the implementation of social distancing regulations, and has been dispatching volunteers to try to discipline people, without having to dispatch the police.
RELATED
The new standards for nursing homes emerge the day after an AP report in which families of the sick, politicians, and supervisory agencies of such homes criticized the Cuomo administration for the care given to those facilities.
One of the things they criticized was the order that nursing homes accept new residents even if they are sick with coronavirus, which according to critics will accelerate the spread in places that have already become foci of the disease.
Of the 26,000 coronavirus deaths recorded in nursing homes across the United States, a fifth – about 5,300 – occurred in New York, according to an Associated Press count.
It is the highest number of deaths in nursing homes in the entire country, although there are other states that have had difficulty controlling the epidemic in this type of facility. In New York, the percentage of deaths in nursing homes is higher than in other states, Cuomo said.
