Back on March 25, 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that required nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients. This was despite it being known — even at that point — that seniors were the most vulnerable population. After that order, thousands died in the nursing homes in New York. Cuomo later tried to cover that up, by changing the way that the deaths were counted, as I reported in May of 2020. Once the numbers started getting attention, suddenly, the way New York was counting the deaths changed. They started not counting the deaths as nursing home deaths if the people died in the hospital — as likely most might after they got sick in the nursing home. Thus, they were able to distort the numbers to blunt the criticism of Cuomo in regard to his March order.

New York wasn’t the only state that issued such an order — Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania did it as well. All states with Democratic governors.

Florida on the other hand — governed by Republican Ron DeSantis — operated from sense. While Democratic governors were endangering their most at-risk seniors, DeSantis forbade such an action.

From the start of the pandemic, the state ordered that hospitals cannot release nursing home residents back to those facilities if they test positive for the virus. With some people testing positive with lingering COVID-19 indicators days or weeks after they seemingly recover, the state began opening the transitional nursing homes that can handle stable coronavirus patients.

So, you would have thought that other states would now have learned a lesson from the bad choices that cost thousands of people their lives. But now, there’s Connecticut, which appears to be unaware of the thousands of dead who died just next door in New York. First, it was reported that the Connecticut Department of Public Health was ordering nursing homes to take COVID-positive patients, even as the numbers of COVID cases are now surging in nursing homes.

They previously were requiring negative tests before they could go into a nursing home. Now that is no longer required.

Nursing homes will have to accept COVID-positive admissions from hospitals, according to a new requirement from the Connecticut Department of Public Health https://t.co/czoBnjcXMe

— Hartford Courant (@hartfordcourant) January 6, 2022

But when that got a lot of understandable backlash; now, we’re being told that they are not “forcing,” just “asking.”

Correction: The Lamont administration is not forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients. They are asking them to https://t.co/5rFPynY4yx

— Hartford Courant (@hartfordcourant) January 7, 2022

But ordering or asking, it’s putting the nursing home at risk and would seem to require the nursing homes to take affirmative action to reject the admission. Why would you even want anyone who was still positive to go into a nursing home? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you got COVID cash from the various legislative bills, as every state did, why not apply that to a transitional facility like the kind Florida set up if you were in that need? Why would you ever want to put those in nursing homes who are most at risk in danger? Yes, Connecticut’s governor is…wait for it…a Democrat, Ned Lamont. Which I suppose, answers my question.