New York City Nursing Home Leaves Dead Residents In Beds Amid Coronavirus Crisis

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About 90 residents have died amid the coronavirus crisis at just two Brooklyn nursing homes — and the situation is so dire at one that victims’ bodies are being left in their beds, The New York Post has learned.

“These places don’t have morgues,” a nurse at the Chateau at Brooklyn Rehabilitation & Nursing Center in Sheepshead Bay said Monday.

“They were putting them downstairs but now a lot of them are being left in their rooms. What else can you do right now?”

The nurse, who came out of the building pulling a roller case and a red biohazard bucket, added, “It’s so sad to be taking blood from someone and the person in the next bed — next to them — is dead.”

Another employee at the 189-bed Chateau at Brooklyn said that “just over 40” residents had died there “in the last three weeks.”

“They got several patients in isolation now and they are doing a whole lot of cleaning,” the worker said.

But the worker noted, “It’s worse at my other job. At King David on Cropsey [Avenue], they’re closing in on 50.”

City Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn), whose district lies near the 271-bed King David Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Gravesend, said he’d been “getting reports of ambulances coming in and out” of the facility.

“No one from the city or state has been able to confirm virus cases but clearly something is going on,” he said.

The shocking revelations came as the state Department of Health released its first breakdown of nursing-home deaths due to COVID-19, which totaled 1,064 as of Sunday, April 12, 2020.

Hard-hit Queens led the list with 193 fatalities, followed by 158 in The Bronx and 136 in Brooklyn, while Suffolk, Nassau, and Westchester had 116, 115 and 113, respectively.

During Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing in Albany, officials said they wouldn’t detail the numbers of deaths at individual facilities due to privacy concerns.

A worker at the King David Center tested positive for the coronavirus on March 8 in what may have been the first case of the disease in any city nursing home, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Although eight residents who had contact with the worker tested negative, the virus spread through the facility and cases have been confirmed there, a spokesman for its owner, the Bay Ridge-based Allure Group, told the Times.

The report didn’t note any deaths at the King David Center, but said another of Allure’s six facilities, the Crown Heights Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, had to create a makeshift morgue after more than 15 residents died of COVID-19 and funeral homes couldn’t handle all the bodies.

The Chateau at Brooklyn is owned by CareRite Centers of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, which also owns 30 other nursing homes in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Tennessee.

At one — the Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing in Gallatin, Tennessee — 14 residents have died amid a COVID-19 outbreak in which more than 70 patients and 30 staffers have tested positive for the disease, according to Nashville’s News4.

Sources:

New York Post: NYC nursing home leaves dead residents in beds amid coronavirus crisis

Featured and Top Image Courtesy Of Chateau at Brooklyn Rehabilitation & Nursing Center website