Worth reading the entire article because the death toll is much larger than the home director is saying it is
29 Dead at One Nursing Home From the Virus. Or More. No One Will Say.
What is happening inside a Queens nursing home hit by the outbreak? Relatives of residents said there was a disturbing lack of information.
By John Leland, Amy Julia Harris and Tracey Tully
April 16, 2020
Berna Lee got the call from the nursing home in Queens on April 3: Her mother had a fever, nothing serious. She was assured that there were no cases of coronavirus in the home. Then she started calling workers there.
“One said, ‘Girl, let me tell you, it’s crazy here,’” Ms. Lee said. “‘Six people died today.’”
In a panic, Ms. Lee drove from her home in Rhode Island to the nursing home, beginning a two-week scramble for information, as workers at the facility, Sapphire Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing of Central Queens, told her privately that many residents had died, and that most of the home’s leadership was out sick or in quarantine.
Finally, she banged on her mother’s first-floor window to see if she was OK. It was unclear whether her mother understood what was happening, Ms. Lee said.
“I didn’t know how bad it was,” she said. “People told me bodies were dropping.”
The crisis at Sapphire highlights not only the desperate state of nursing homes in the New York region, which have become a center of the coronavirus outbreak, with nearly 2,500 deaths in New York alone, up more than 1,000 in the last week. It also illustrates what relatives of residents said was a deeply troubling lack of information about what is going on inside the homes.
Sapphire has not disclosed how many residents have died in the outbreak, but on Wednesday, the home’s administrator told the local state assemblyman, Ron Kim, that the total was 29, Mr. Kim said.
But the numbers given by the home, Mr. Kim said, did not match what he was hearing from workers there.
“Everyone is trying to tell me that a lot more people died than the 29 they are citing,” he said.
Two workers at the home, which has 227 beds, also told The New York Times that the actual death toll was considerably higher, as many as 60 residents.
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