DATE POSTED: June 26, 2023.

On May 17, three members of our research team attended a hearing by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, a recent addition to the House Oversight Committee. Titled “Like Fire Through Dry Grass: Nursing Home Mortality & COVID-19 Policies,” the hearing examined how state-level policies worsened COVID mortality rates in nursing homes. In the process, it provided unique insight into how our elected officials assign authority—and blame—over COVID mortality and grief.

The in-chamber broadcast of the witnesses testifying before the subcommittee members.
Photo by Sarah Wagner.

The hearing focused mainly on the botched response to COVID-19 by New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo. At the beginning of the pandemic, Cuomo signed a “must-admit” order requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-infected patients from overcrowded hospitals, even if they did not have the capabilities to properly treat them. The deadly effects of this decision are unmistakable: thousands of seniors died from COVID in understaffed and unprepared nursing facilities, leaving behind grieving families and friends who allegedly received little reassurance from Cuomo’s government.

“We never saw our beautiful mother again. She was dead shortly after, gasping for air, alone, confused, and scared without her daughters, who were her translators and caregivers.”

Vivian Zayas, Co-Founder of Voices for Seniors

Four witnesses were invited to testify to the subcommittee, sitting side-by-side across from a sparsely attended group of House committee members. Janice Dean, senior meteorologist at Fox News, and Vivian Zayas, Co-Founder of Voices for Seniors, represented COVID mourners, with both having lost close relatives to the virus in New York’s crowded nursing homes. Ms. Zayas shared a story about her mother, who passed away after being quarantined in a rehab facility where she had been expected to stay only temporarily. She said, “Our daily visits to the nursing home came to an abrupt end in March of 2020 when the facility called to notify us that all visitation would be suspended for approximately two weeks. We never saw our beautiful mother again. She was dead shortly after, gasping for air, alone, confused, and scared without her daughters, who were her translators and caregivers.”

Ms. Zayas was joined by several other bereaved activists from the Voices for Seniors organization, who held up photographs of their deceased relatives for the representatives to see.

“The one thing that COVID did do is kind of get under the floorboards and show us how much rot there already is.”

Janice Dean

Meanwhile, policy expert Bill Hammond, Senior Fellow for Health Policy at the Empire Center, and Dr. David Grabowski, Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard University, analyzed the response to COVID-19, presenting statistics and data to measure its impact on elder care facilities. Unlike the other three witnesses, Grabowski was invited by the minority Democratic Party, whose members on the subcommittee hoped to have their own stake in the Republican-controlled debate. Dr. Grabowski outlined how devastating COVID has been to nursing homes, especially in New York: “After accounting for the gap in federal data at the start of the pandemic, there have been over 1.6 million COVID cases among nursing home residents leading to roughly 176,000 COVID-related fatalities. For comparative purposes, this is equivalent to 12% of all residents living in a nursing home at the start of the pandemic.”

In Dr. Grabowski’s words, the pandemic represented a “crisis on top of a crisis.” Janice Dean made a similar point during the Q & A with Congressional members, stressing that “these issues have been in place for a long time . . . . but the one thing that COVID did do is kind of get under the floorboards and show us how much rot there already is.”

Each of the House representatives expressed their condolences to the bereaved. At the same time, they often related to either their credentials, or to their own experiences, to establish authority over the way they spoke about the pandemic. Rep. Dingell (D-MI) talked about searching her district for spare body bags as medical clinics went through severe shortages. Rep. McCormick (R-GA) shared his experiences as a first responder during COVID in a speech criticizing the federal government’s perceived overreach.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) addressing the subcommittee hearing.
Photo by Sarah Wagner.

Yet both parties seemed just as interested in something else: deciding who was responsible for the failures in New York state’s nursing homes. The Republicans present were more than happy to pin the blame on former Governor Cuomo, underscoring the various ways he failed to effectively respond to the pandemic. His must-admit policy, they said, both defied CDC recommendations and flooded unprepared nursing homes with COVID-infected patients. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) used a poster board to display an e-mail from Cuomo — a display which was difficult to make out for the live audience, but much more visible to the cameras.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) addressing the subcommittee hearing.
Photo by Sarah Wagner.

The Democrats, meanwhile, didn’t try to absolve Cuomo or his actions. Instead, they collectively shifted the blame to then-President Trump. Rep. Raskin (D-MA), using a similar strategy as Rep. Talliomakis, showed off a board plastered with headlines from news outlets across the country, all blasting Trump’s limited response to the spread of the pandemic.

As our team observed the hearing, we took note of the ways in which politicians on both sides of the aisle worked to align themselves with and at times assert authority over COVID-19 mourners’ grieving. In the process, they drew on both the stories of mourners and the statistics provided by policy experts to weave them into their own broader political agendas.