Discrepancy between New York’s COVID-19 death count and federal numbers widens: AP analysis

The discrepancy between New York’s COVID-19 death count and federal numbers has widened, according to an analysis done by The Associated Press. 

The wire service found the federal government has an additional 11,000 deaths from the coronavirus that New York has not included in their count.

The state provided the federal government with 54,000 death certificates that have the coronavirus as the cause or contributing factor in a person’s death, but the state is only counting 43,000 of those deaths.

An official from New York’s Department of Health stated there is not a separation between federal and state data as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gets its numbers from the state. 

The gap between the numbers is due to the way New York has decided to count COVID-19 deaths. The state will only count laboratory-confirmed deaths from hospitals, nursing homes and adult-care facilities, according to the AP.

The unusual way of counting deaths leaves out a host of people, including those who most likely died from the virus but could not get it confirmed early on due to lack of testing.

It also excludes people who died at home, hospice, state-run homes for people with disabilities and in state prisons.

The tracker is “fully transparent as to what data is on there. We never said it was the full death count,” a health department official told The Hill.

The official said there were deaths outside the parameters the state has used since the beginning of the pandemic to track coronavirus deaths.

“It’s a little strange,” Bob Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told the AP. “They’re providing us with the death certificate information so they have it. I don’t know why they wouldn’t use those numbers.”

The state health department said in a statement that “New York State reports every single COVID-19 death publicly — every confirmed death reported by hospitals, nursing homes and adult care facilities in the state tracker and all preliminary death certificate data, including unconfirmed cases and home deaths, to the federal government which in turn reports that data online, allowing the public full access to all of this detailed data on a daily basis.”

The health official also maintained that the way coronavirus deaths are counted between states should not be compared.

The discrepancy comes as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has faced accusations of falsifying COVID-19 nursing home deaths to help his reputation.

The Hill has reached out to the CDC and Cuomo’s office for comment.

Updated at 11:40 a.m.