The Trump administration will implement new mandatory federal COVID-19 testing and reporting rules for nursing homes this week in an effort to prevent the death toll that occurred in New York at the height of the virus, a new report says.
The new rules will mandate that all nursing homes offer coronavirus tests to patients if anyone in the facility contracts COVID-19 or exhibits symptoms, the New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/08/24/feds-imposing-new-testing-rules-in-wake-of-cuomos-nursing-home-fiasco/">reports</a>. The nursing homes will be required to report test results in most cases.
“These new rules represent a dramatic ramp-up in our efforts to track and control the spread of COVID-19, especially in nursing homes,” Centers for Medicare &amp; Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement.
&#8220;One administration official was more blunt in describing the changes. &#8216;President Trump is mandating everything Gov. Cuomo failed to do in order to protect America’s seniors from this virus,&#8217; the official said,&#8221; according to The Post.
In March, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept people even if they tested positive for the virus. “No resident shall be denied readmission or admission to the NH [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission,” read Cuomo’s order.
&#8220;During this global health emergency, all NHs must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals to NHs. Residents are deemed appropriate for return to a NH upon a determination by the hospital physician or designee that the resident is medically stable for return,” said the order, which The Associated Press reported sent &#8220;6,300 infected people to nursing homes during the crisis has been blamed in part for the higher death rate in New York.&#8221;
On May 11, Cuomo reversed the March 25 order that forced nursing homes to accept patients who tested positive for coronavirus despite testing deficiencies for both residents and staff.
The order has disappeared from the state&#8217;s health department web page. &#8220;The <a href="https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2020/03/doh_covid19-_nhadmissionsreadmissions_-032520.pdf">webpage</a> that once contained the order now directs to a page indicating that the file is ‘not found.’ The archive indicates that the deletion occurred sometime after May 5, around the time that criticism over New York’s nursing home fatalities intensified,” Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-york-health-website-deletes-cuomos-order-on-nursing-homes">reported</a>.
The AP this month detailed nursing home deaths in New York in a piece headlined, &#8220;New York’s true nursing home death toll cloaked in secrecy.&#8221;
&#8220;For all 43 states that break out nursing home data, resident deaths make up 44% of total COVID deaths in their states, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Assuming the same proportion held in New York, that would translate to more than 11,000 nursing home deaths,&#8221; the AP said.
<blockquote>Nearly every time Cuomo is questioned about New York’s nursing home death toll, he brushes off criticism as politically motivated and notes that his state’s percentage of nursing home deaths out of its overall COVID-19 death toll is around 20%, far less than Pennsylvania’s 68%, Massachusetts’ 64% and New Jersey’s 44%.
“Look at the basic facts where New York is versus other states,” Cuomo said during a briefing Monday. “You look at where New York is as a percentage of nursing home deaths, it’s all the way at the bottom of the list.”</blockquote>
Related: CURL: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/curl-despite-media-swoon-ny-gov-cuomo-has-done-abysmal-job-handling-covid-19">Despite Media Swoon, NY Gov. Cuomo Has Done Abysmal Job Handling COVID-19</a>

Senior man in wheelchair wearing protective mask to prevent coronavirus transmission on porch

Feds To Impose New Coronavirus Testing Rules After New York Nursing Home Disaster: Report

Antibody test

COVID

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University of Miami researchers&#8217; antibody testing out of Miami-Dade County in Florida showed that about 6% of the population has had the China-originated novel coronavirus, COVID-19, extrapolating to an estimated 165,000 infections countywide, about 16 times higher than reported.
Since the recorded number of infections via the health department is well below that number, around 10,600 infection, this means the fatality rate is also far lower than reported.
Ruling in the possibility of false positives, the researchers are 95% confident the true infection rate is between 4.4% and 7.9% of the population, leaving them with their 6% estimate as the best possible representation, the <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242260406.html">Miami Herald</a> reported Friday. &#8220;That would mean about 165,000 estimated infections in Miami-Dade, with the margin of error equating to 123,000 residents on the low end and 221,000 residents on the high end,&#8221; the report noted.
There have been <a href="https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/more-than-1000-coronavirus-related-deaths-in-florida-with-over-30000-cases/2224415/">287</a> COVID-19-related deaths in the county with an estimated 165,000 cases, meaning the death rate would hover around .17%.
As noted by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-york-antibody-test-results-suggest-covid-infection-rate-significantly-higher-than-reported">The Daily Wire</a> last week, antibody testing out of New York City showed that an estimated one in five New Yorkers have COVID-19, again significantly dropping the reported fatality rate of the virus.
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“More than 21% of the New York City residents given coronavirus antibody tests earlier this week tested positive, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday,” a report from <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-than-21-of-new-york-city-residents-tested-for-coronavirus-antibodies-were-positive-says-gov-cuomo-2020-04-23">MarketWatch</a> outlined.
“Monday marked the start of a statewide initiative to test 3,000 New Yorkers for the presence of antibodies, which are made in response to viral infections,” the report noted. “The preliminary results mean that one in five of the city residents tested have had coronavirus and developed the antibodies to fight it. Across the state, 13.9% of the individuals tested were positive for antibodies, Cuomo told reporters at a daily news briefing.”
Similarly, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/antibody-test-results-from-california-suggest-covid-death-rate-significantly-lower-than-reported">antibody testing</a> recently conducted in California&#8217;s Santa Clara County found that the death rate for COVID-19 to be significantly lower than reported, too.
“Highly anticipated antibody testing results out of Santa Clara County in California headed by a Stanford University professor were released on Friday, showing that the estimated number of positive novel coronavirus cases is likely 50-80 times higher than reported, thus significantly dropping the estimated fatality rate,” The Daily Wire reported last week. “The <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1">study</a>, the first large-scale community antibody testing in the nation and led by Dr. Eran Bendavid, the associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, found that 2.5 to 4.2% of the 3,330 subjects tested were found to have COVID-19 antibodies.”
“These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases,” the study’s abstract said.
“The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases,” according to the researchers. If the number of the recovered cases are similarly undercounted across the nation, the fatality rate would accordingly be overstated.
The trend in antibody testing results seems rather clear: the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 is far more widespread than reported, thus the fatality rate of the disease is correspondingly significantly lower than reported.
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">subscriber</a>.  
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Coronavirus structure

Florida Antibody Testing Suggests Coronavirus Death Rate Far Lower Than Reported

Florida

As antibody tests across the country, <a href="https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-york-virus-deaths-top-15k-cuomo-expected-to-detail-plan-to-fight-nursing-home-outbreaks/2386556/">including New York</a>, indicate that the virus is far less deadly and far wider spread than previously reported, the conclusion is becoming even more inescapable that the lockdowns were a massive mistake. What some argued all along is now being vindicated by the data: we wrecked the economy for no good reason. But don&#8217;t expect those politicians and bureaucrats behind this historic blunder to take any responsibility. Instead, they are resorting to ever more deranged justifications for the policies that have left over 26 million jobless and relegated millions of Americans to the food bank line.
Of all the deranged justifications, perhaps none can top New York Governor Andrew Cuomo&#8217;s <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1253163075710193667?s=20">diatribe at a press briefing yesterday</a>. When asked whether the economic devastation from the lockdowns may prove more disastrous than the illness itself, Cuomo rejected the premise of the question, stating that nothing can be worse than the illness because &#8220;the illness is death.&#8221; He explained that this is especially a problem because the illness may be &#8220;my death as opposed to your death.&#8221; He then claimed, incredibly, that while economic hardship and domestic violence are &#8220;very bad&#8221; results of the shutdowns, they are &#8220;not death.&#8221; Cuomo also argued that the people who want to go to work are too focused on themselves – &#8220;it&#8217;s not just about you,&#8221; he declared – and that ending the shutdowns may result in the deaths of other people besides those who want the shutdowns to end.
This is all quite astounding. First of all, the illness is not death. For a very small minority of people, it will cause death. For most it will not. So, when Cuomo says &#8220;the illness is death,&#8221; what he must mean is that &#8220;the illness is a thing that for a minority of people leads to death.&#8221; But then how can he claim that economic hardship and domestic violence aren&#8217;t, in this same sense, death? Poverty kills millions across the world each year. Domestic violence kills thousands. I&#8217;m sure that Cuomo doesn&#8217;t actually think that domestic violence and poverty aren&#8217;t potentially deadly, but that&#8217;s what he claimed for the sake of rationalizing his lockdown policies.
As for this &#8220;it&#8217;s not just about you&#8221; stuff, that holds true in the other direction as well. If it is selfish for a man to go to work to feed his family because he might get someone else sick, is it not just as selfish to demand or impose a lockdown that will impoverish other people just so that you can be safe? I would argue that &#8220;it&#8217;s not just about you&#8221; applies much more to the people supporting lockdowns than those opposing them, given that the policies are instated and enforced by government officials who sill have jobs and defended by media personalities who still have jobs. They get all of the benefit of the shutdown – namely, whatever nominal and temporary safety the policies might afford – but suffer almost none of the consequences. How could the people suffering the consequences be the selfish ones in this equation?
Finally, Cuomo&#8217;s arguments are wrong in a more fundamental sense because they&#8217;re built on the premise that &#8220;nothing can be worse&#8221; than death. From a societal standpoint, that is absurd. If we were actually governed that way on a consistent basis, it would mean the end of human civilization. You simply cannot have a functioning civilization that views the avoidance of death as the ultimate and overriding goal, and death itself as a thing that must be avoided at literally any cost. By that logic, every action that carries risk should be banned. All driving banned. All vehicles impounded. Every pool and baseball diamond and beach and amusement park closed. To permit any of these things is to admit that we are willing to risk death. And often we are willing to face a much greater risk of death than coronavirus presents for things much less essential than our jobs and livelihoods. Indeed, it&#8217;s probably much more likely that a young and healthy person drowns at the beach because of a riptide than it is that he dies from contracting the virus at the beach. And yet we closed the beaches only for fear of the latter scenario. This is irrational in the extreme. And Cuomo&#8217;s defense of these policies is just as irrational.

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Antibody test

Feds To Impose New Coronavirus Testing Rules After New York Nursing Home Disaster: Report

Florida Antibody Testing Suggests Coronavirus Death Rate Far Lower Than Reported

WALSH: Governor Cuomo’s Justification Of The Shutdowns Is Incoherent And Immoral