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Former Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine faced difficult questions Thursday during a Senate confirmation hearing regarding reported discrepancies in state records on related nursing home deaths to COVID.
Levine was appointed by President Biden to serve as assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services.
“You assured me Pennsylvania did not do what New York did, which it accurately reported,” Senator Susan Collins, R-Maine, told LevineThursday. “However, I am told that in September 2020, Spotlight PA reported issues with inadequate disclosure of cases and deaths in nursing homes,” she continued, pointing to establishments that were found to be failing. having declared “no data” when the establishments claimed to have.
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Levine said those discrepancies could be explained because of the “time lag” between when a death was reported and when it hit the Pennsylvania Electronic Death Reporting System (EDRS).
But the Keystone State publication – Spotlight PA – alleged that Levine’s explanation for “lag” on Thursday did not really address the discrepancies it found.
The issue emerged after nursing homes ‘self-reported’ their coronavirus cases and deaths to the state’s health department through separate online portals, and not through the state’s EDRS, as Levine alleged on Thursday.
The lack of uniform reporting would have led to irregularities and incomplete records.
In an attempt to remedy the reporting anomalies, the Pennsylvania Department of Health advised nursing home administrators in a June 18 letter that they could face fines or jail time if they don’t. did not comply with state reporting requirements.
But Spotlight PA found that although establishments claimed they were submitting their coronavirus nursing home data through the state system, irregularities persisted.
Additionally, facilities were either frustrated that their public data was full of errors, or could not explain why their data was excluded entirely from weekly state reports.
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Point-of-sale investigation reports revealed that errors continue to plague the state’s EDRS. On February 17, 139 establishments recorded “no data”, followed by missing data for 145 establishments the following week, on February 23.
Fox News could not immediately contact the state Department of Health for comment, but found that more than half of all reported deaths in Pennsylvania were from cases of COVID-19 found in homes in retirement.
Pennsylvania has reported nearly 923,000 cases of the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, with nearly 24,000 deaths – of which 12,355 have been reported by nursing homes.
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