As New York’s group home workers increasingly balked at last-minute assignments at COVID-19-infected facilities with lax health standards, a senior manager ordered staff to “work now and grieve later” or face punishment, an internal email obtained by the Washington Examiner shows.
Similar to its nursing homes, New York had a policy of co-mingling healthy and infected residents in its developmentally disabled group home system, resulting in the deaths of 36 workers and infections of 11,639 as of May 5. Numerous employees told the Washington Examiner that they lived with babies or elderly people and were terrified of working in such conditions.
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“All refusals to follow a directive to float to another residence and or be mandated, will be considered an act of insubordination, which will result in administrative follow up actions,” wrote senior manager Raymond Bowman in a Nov. 3, 2020 email to midlevel managers at the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities. He invited workers to file a grievance with their union later, if appropriate.
Ny group home email.JPGHowever, OPWDD Communications Director Jennifer O’Sullivan told the Washington Examiner in an earlier email that staff willingly went into unprotected homes where infected residents were not quarantined:
“The 32 [deceased] staff members were not ‘forced’ to work in infectious homes – that is just patently false and absolutely demeaning to the 100,000 direct care professionals in New York State who show up to do their job every day because they not only are passionate about what they do, but they care about the people they support.”
She also said infected residents are either housed at a hospital or in a temporary site away from the healthy population. Four employees told the Washington Examiner that this was untrue because they worked in COVID-19-infected facilities.
Workers who staffed healthy homes were frequently transferred, or “floated,” to infectious homes when they arrived for a shift — and without warning. The transfers were necessary to backfill severe staffing shortages, usually in homes with a COVID-positive resident. Early in the pandemic, the workers were told of the transfers before a shift, but the policy was changed when huge numbers of employees started calling in sick when COVID-19 houses started popping up.
Workers would inadvertently spread the virus as they floated throughout the state but were not routinely tested for COVID-19. More than 575 residents died of COVID, and 7,104 have been infected.
Care worker Jeff Monsour and many others recounted how infected residents have the run of the house where healthy residents also live. The co-mingling policy is still in effect at the network of 7,000 group homes even though it was lifted at the state’s nursing homes in May 2020. The state has numerous empty facilities that could be used as quarantine homes.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is under investigation by the New York attorney general for his handling of the nursing home crisis, which killed 9,000 residents. Cuomo mandated that infected, hospitalized residents return to their homes where the disease spread. State lawmakers have asked the governor to lift the mandate at group homes but have not been successful.
One worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said he worked in COVID-infected homes and caught the disease.
“A few of the staff with a lot of rotations requested time off to not infect us, and they were refused,” he said. “They weren’t floating just from this particular house. They were floating from 25 houses. And they wouldn’t give me time off to make sure I didn’t catch COVID from them. Then several residents got COVID.”
Residents were locked down during the pandemic and could not have caught COVID-19 from an outside location.
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The employee said OPWDD would not dispatch lab workers to the homes to test residents and staff for COVID-19, so he took time off and went to the doctor. His test was positive.
“There are [state owned] houses and empty buildings. They could’ve put sick people in there,” the employee said. “One building could hold 500 people. It breaks my heart because they care to claim about the individuals, and by their actions, they directly hurt people. I love my job, but I hate the agency. These people have blood on their hands.”
