Michigan State Auditor: Whitmer Administration Undercounted Nursing Home Deaths By 30% or More

No different from former disgraced New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo, Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration severely undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths in her state, according to a state auditor general report.

A new audit report found that Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration severely undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths by 42 percent, or 2,386. Not as bad as The Empire State, but then again, that could account for population differences.

Questions to be answered are how many nursing home deaths happened in Michigan and did Whitmer’s COVID policies worsen nursing home deaths by forcing COVID-infected patients into nursing homes where the most vulnerable people, the elderly, were then infected and died?

We’ve known since the beginning that the COVID-19 virus kills elderly patients and those with one or more comorbidities. For example, 84 percent of COVID-19 deaths were people who were aged 60 or older.

The audit report noted that the total number of COVID deaths at nursing homes was 8,061 and the previous tally was 5,675.

The problem with federal guidelines is there is always a chance that stupid people came up with them. For example, close to 50 percent of the 2,386 disputed deaths were reported based on federal reporting requirements that mandate large long-term care facilities must report COVID-19 deaths, but smaller facilities with 12 or fewer beds are not required to report COVID-19 deaths. I guess the federal government feels those deaths are not worth knowing about so long as it cuts down on their paperwork.

State Representative Steve Johnson (R-Wayland), Chairman of the Michigan House Oversight Committee, asked why, even if Governor Whitmer’s executive orders applied to all nursing homes, they didn’t count all the deaths at all facilities?

“And when we were looking into this to see just how deadly that policy was, the nursing home death numbers we received from the department weren’t including everything,” Johnson said. According to the report, Whitmer’s administration undercounted nursing home deaths by 30 percent.

“All of these facilities were subject to that executive order by Governor Whitmer to place COVID positive patients into nursing homes,” Johnson said according to The Center Square during a phone interview. “When we asked for the information, the Whitmer administration conveniently gives us this self-reported number.”

The answer is simple. Through their behavior and evidence discovered, Democrats who undercounted nursing home deaths care more about their public image than the people they were elected to represent. The federal guidelines clearly said that if hospitals were going to be overwhelmed, then the state could make agreements with nursing home administrators to bring COVID infected patients into the nursing homes. The guidelines said the state had to give time to the facilities to prepare for infected patient being brought in to protect the elderly who were living there. The problem is that at that time, Democrats were very busy blaming then President Donald Trump for every COVID death and so the governors, the Democrat governors, were very self-conscious about how their own state COVID policies were handling the pandemic. So they used the guidelines to move COVID infected patients into nursing homes but they skipped over the part about working it out with the nursing home administrators to prepare for their arrival and just forced patients into the facilities to get them off the count of hospital admissions. It appears that the Whitmer administration didn’t want news to go out that their hospitals were being overwhelmed because they feared that would be a reflection on their COVID policies. So, they allegedly shoved COVID patients into nursing homes to get them out of the way and they needlessly killed a lot of elderly people. Then, like Cuomo, they hid the numbers so that the Trump administration wouldn’t come down on them for violating the CDC guidelines.

In fact, I remember when Cuomo brought into one of his daily COVID briefings one of his bureaucrats from the state health department to lie, saying that they put their COVID infected patients into nursing homes because they were following the Trump administration’s guidelines. That lie was debunked by Seema Verma, who at that time was the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator. She gave a statement saying that New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo and other Democrat governors originally issued guidance that contradicted federal guidelines for nursing homes battling the pandemic virus.

“I just want to make it very clear that our guidance was absolutely crystal clear,” Verma said in an interview late last week. “It was clear and unmistakable. Any insinuation to the contrary is woefully mistaken at best and dishonest at worst. We put out our guidance on March 13. It’s very clear when it says that, I’m actually going to read this to you, it says that: ‘When should a nursing home accept a resident who is diagnosed with COVID-18?’ It says: ‘A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19  and still under transmission-based precautions,’ which means if this person is infectious you have to take precautions. It says ‘as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for transmission-based precautions.’ It says: ‘If a nursing home cannot, it must wait until these precautions are discontinued,’ meaning if you are not able to care for this patient—somebody is still positive and you’re not equipped to care for the patient, then you shouldn’t accept the patient into your care. That’s really important because longstanding discharge—when you’re discharging a patient from the hospital, longstanding guidelines require when you transfer them somewhere you transfer them to a place that can take care of their needs whether they’re going home or they’re going to a nursing home or some other facility.”

We reported back in July 2021 that the Biden Department of Justice, which is so corrupt, refused to investigate Whitmer’s nursing home deaths. It took the audit report to bring any of this to light. Democrats protect their own at all costs until, as Cuomo discovered, they are no longer useful to the party.

The other approximately one thousand new deaths were discovered by the auditor re-verifying death certificates with last known addresses, according to Rep. Johnson. The kicker is that even though many of the people who died had their last known address at a nursing home facility, where they died isn’t known because the facility didn’t report that person as a COVID death. It is possible that these people caught COVID in their nursing home and were transported to a hospital where they died.

“There’s no reason why we should only count some of them, and not all of them,” Johnson said. “Every one of those lives mattered.”

There should be a criminal investigation. Thousands of people died.

“For the department to just say, ‘well, we’ll just accept whatever they tell us’ – well that’s pretty weak,” Johnson said. “You should know that they aren’t going to be incentivized to give us every number out there, and so we should treat their numbers with a healthy amount of skepticism.”

“If it’s not just negligence, which I think is bad enough on its own, but if there is actually a concerted effort within the administration not to count nursing home deaths – I think that’s near criminal,” Johnson said.