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A 66-year-old patient from the Dry Harbor nursing home died of COVID-19 last week after the Queens facility gave vaccines only to permanent residents – a misguided policy the state reportedly knew in advance.
Vita Fontanetta, known as Tina, was admitted to the 360-bed facility to recover from inflamed legs on January 11. When the nursing home distributed vaccines on Jan.13, she was kicked out, a family member told City Councilor Robert Holden.
On January 18, the grandmother of two was returned to hospital with anemia and tested positive for COVID upon arrival, he said.
She died at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center on January 23.
“I feel like the nursing home was somehow responsible,” Fontanetta’s daughter-in-law told Holden (D-Queens) after a front page report in The Post revealed the fiasco of Selective Dry Harbor vaccine.
“It doesn’t appear that the state is adequately monitoring nursing facilities, whether it’s for the prevention of Covid or the deployment of vaccines,” Holden said on Saturday.
COVID-19 outbreak in Dry Harbor – at least 44 residents and 11 staff have tested positive since December 22 – reveals flaws in Cuomo administration’s safety and immunization oversight in homes of New York nursing.
Holden has joined assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens), who lost an uncle in a nursing home to COVID-19, to call for a broad independent investigation.
Councilman’s 96-year-old mother Anne Holden, a rehabilitation patient in Dry Harbor, was also excluded from an initial round of vaccinations the nursing home administered to permanent residents as part of a federally administered program by CVS on December 23.
Anne received a first dose three weeks later, on January 13, when other residents received a second dose. She came down with COVID on January 20 and was hospitalized. She remains in stable condition.
Other patients and families are suffering from COVID after Dry Harbor fails to vaccinate them.
Carmen Martinez, a resident since April, was excluded from vaccinations on December 23, her son Antonio Collazo told the Post.
Collazo said he received a recorded message from Dry Harbor on Christmas Eve saying he had vaccinated “residents who requested it”.
Collazo complained that he requested the vaccine for his mother, who has mild Alzheimer’s disease. The 92-year-old was then due to receive her first dose on January 13.
But on January 12, Martinez tested positive for COVID. She was hospitalized and is now unconscious on a ventilator, clinging to life.
“I will never be able to see her alive again, ”Collazo said of her mother, a retired federal employee, her grandmother and her great-grandmother.
A 73-year-old Queens man sent to Dry Harbor to recover from a broken hip also missed the vaccine before Christmas. He tested positive for Covid on January 4, his sister told The Post.
Now he will have to wait 90 days to get the vaccine. He must also stop his cancer treatment until he recovers from COVID, she said.
“I don’t know what the retirement home was thinking. Why would they not protect rehabilitation patients?
Last week the sister received a recorded phone message from Dry Harbor administrator Mark Solomon assuring “that they will distribute the vaccines to everyone out there and that we shouldn’t worry about our family members. ”She declared. “A little too late for my brother and the city councilor’s mother.
Her brother remains on the fourth floor of Dry Harbor, where all of the COVID patients are housed.
Solomon did not return any messages seeking comment.
Holden said he spoke to a state health department investigator last week, who told him she was aware of Dry Harbor’s plan to only vaccinate permanent residents first, but did nothing to correct or stop it.
“Do you think it is wise during a Covid epidemic to only vaccinate a part of the patients, giving some people only one chance to fight? Holden said he asked Inspector Carmen Meliton.
“It’s not for me to say whether it’s true or not,” he said, replied Meliton.
Jonah Bruno, a spokesperson for the state’s health department, contradicted the statements, saying nursing homes are not required to submit a vaccination plan to the state.
But Bruno reiterated that Dry Harbor did not follow state protocol, saying the state did not have a policy that prioritizes residents or patients.
“Vaccines are given to all residents of nursing homes regardless of their short or long term stay,” he said.
Holden is frustrated. “Obviously one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing in the health ministry,” he said.
Bruno did not respond when asked if Dry Harbor had informed the Department of Health of Fontanetta’s death. He also did not answer the question of how many unvaccinated residents or others who tested positive in Dry Harbor later died in hospitals.
Since the start of the pandemic, the state has counted the reported deaths of COVID patients who died in nursing homes – not those who caught the virus in nursing homes and died in hospitals.
Last week, State Attorney General Letitia James released a report denouncing the Cuomo administration for significantly underreporting nursing home deaths.
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