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LANSING, Mich. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been criticized for a nursing home policy put in place by her government in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Initially, patients who tested positive for COVID were placed in the same facility with patients who did not have a COVID. Whitmer ended that practice after the first six months of the pandemic.
Increasing attention is being paid to the policy with the prospect of lawsuits and other legal action. Whitmer said she remains proud of her team’s overall response to the coronavirus.
READ: Michigan AG Investigates Requests to Investigate State Nursing Home Policy
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Whitmer’s policies differed from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in that Whitmer did not force COVID-positive patients to stay with COVID-negative patients. Instead, Whitmer spurred the process by paying homes to take in patients who contracted COVID-19.
By the most current census, the number of long-term care deaths is 5,537 in Michigan, which is more than 35 percent of all COVID deaths in the state.
When Cuomo came under fire for allegedly underreporting the number of seniors who had died from nursing homes and were perishing in hospitals, Local 4 filed a freedom of information request to investigate Michigan’s numbers. There are not any.
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The request was returned with a refusal of the data, saying “no data on the location of the death has been collected.”
“I am proud of the work we have done. We can look through different angles of statistics and compare ourselves to other states, but… I think it can be a silly task sometimes because the way we collect data differs from state to state, ”said Whitmer. “If there is never a national strategy, it is difficult to really compare apples with apples.”
Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido is expected to announce an attempt to sue Whitmer for her nursing home policy.
The Department of Health and Human Services sent an update saying that nursing home patients who were transferred to hospital and then died would be counted as nursing home death – if they had not been released from the care facility.
READCoronavirus death toll at neighboring healthcare facilities in Metro Detroit may be worst in the US.
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Last year, a report found that Michigan’s plan to create “hubs” for nursing home residents with COVID-19 was “logical and appropriate,” and found no significant evidence of transmission of the virus between patients and residents.
The report, released by the Center for Health and Research Transformation (CHRT), evaluated the state’s regional nursing home hub strategy, comparing the approach with results in other states. CHRT is a University of Michigan affiliated non-profit organization.
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