Nursing Home's Pleas For Coronavirus Help Rejected: Report

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — A Cobble Hill nursing home grappling with the coronavirus outbreak tried to get residents into temporary overflow hospitals for the outbreak but state officials rejected the plea, according to a report.

The largely-empty U.S. Naval hospital ship Comfort and the Javits Center were only for hospitals' overflow patients, officials told a Cobble Hill Health Center executive, the New York Post first reported.

Eventually, 55 residents at Cobble Hill Health Center died — the most reported at any New York nursing home.

The Post's report details emails sent by the nursing home's CEO Danny Tuchman to state Health Department officials.

“We don’t have the ability to cohort right now based on staffing and we really want to protect our other patients,” Tuchman wrote them in early April, according to the Post report.

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The Comfort and Javits Center only had a few hundred patients at that time, the Post reported. Pentagon officials on Friday announced they would withdraw the hospital ship from the city — the 1,000-bed ship treated fewer than 200 patients during its time docked off Manhattan.

The Post reported that Tuchman was told that the Comfort and Javits were only for hospital patients.

Other New York City nursing homes have grappled with deaths as well.

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