Maybe we could just start out and you tell me a little bit about your mom, can you describe her a little bit?

And she was a loving mother, said five kids. She didn't work, she was always at home baking bread and making food. I have thirty two first cousins.

So fifty to fifty two first cousins. Oh, my gosh, I mean, talk about Irish people. I mean, come on now. But yes, this is two first cousins and then everybody got married. Then it was 104. And then there was everybody had kids. When everybody would come over, she would never get flustered. She just I mean, it was like she was cooking for a soup kitchen. It didn't matter if there was 10 people, 20 people.

There was always enough food. I got to watch the potato salad a couple of times and I would jot down what I saw her doing, somebody like a potato salad recipe, and then I jotted down. It took me about six times of watching it to get all the ingredients.

Wow. What was so special about it?

It tastes like freakin ice cream. It's just so good. And it was like, you know, the trick had to be Yukon gold potatoes. You know how to be Helman's mayonnaise. It had to be just a splash of the red vinegar and it had to be the yellow onion.

I feel like all of that is just making me hungry, saying about all of that.

And that was my mother's big thing, was food and her clothes. My mother dress beautiful.

Yeah. What did she look like? She had auburn hair, light blue eyes, fair skinned. She was my mother's. She was very pretty. And then that's what shocked me when I went to see her, when I hadn't seen her in a while because I wouldn't know that that was my mother. It looked absolutely nothing like her. Nothing. Nothing at all. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the daily, the story of what happened to Lori's mother and thousands of people just like her inside New York's nursing homes is now the subject of a political firestorm and a federal investigation.

Today, we begin a two part look with my colleague, Amy Julia Harris, at how the state's nursing homes became epicenters of death during the pandemic. It's Tuesday, February twenty third. Well, Laurie, can we maybe go back to that time and you tell me the story from the beginning of, you know, how your mom, she was first in the hospital and then went to the nursing home, can you start in February of of what happened?

How did she end up in the hospital?

My mother did for a lot of problem with her leg.

Sullivan story begins almost exactly a year ago in February of twenty twenty.

Of course, she was in the kitchen.

Lori had been living with her mom, Lorraine Sullivan, on Long Island. She says her mom hated being alone. And after Laura's dad died, Lori looked after her. Her mom was 88 years old. She was largely in good health, but she was starting to have a hard time walking. I don't know what it is going down so well.

She saxophone. I can't wear them because they still wear the slippers on the floor. She was slippery.

I got a rubber bottom button first and one day she slipped and fell in the kitchen and hurt her knee.

Wait a minute. You got to do it because you can't treat me gingerly.

Laura says her mom is tough and at first her mom insisted she was fine.

Fine. So we put this water here. I didn't. I don't know what you really want, but eventually Laurie convinced her mom to go to the hospital and she was in there about five days and she still couldn't walk.

So they transferred her to the nursing home, which is next door in the rehab part.

OK, what was the name of the nursing home, Our Lady of Consolation?

Mm hmm. She ended up making a lot of friends, and she would give me a list every day of what everybody wanted. And I either had to pick it up or make it and bring it in for them, and they would sit around and eat the cheese and crackers, platters and everything.

And Laurie visited her mother nearly every day. And she says that while her mom was holding up pretty well, she was looking forward to coming home, which the doctor said would likely be in a few weeks. But then in mid-March, the pandemic slammed New York and Governor Andrew Cuomo, knowing the risk that the virus posed to older residents, announced a lockdown of nursing homes, saying only medically necessary visits would be allowed.

And I said, I'm going to bring it home. And the nursing home said your mother is going to be safer here than she's going to be at home with people coming in and out of the house.

So they were saying because it was a lockdown facility, that would be safer than if she was at home. Where are coming and going?

Right. So we thought, OK, so they'll be on lockdown. Everything will be OK.

So Laurie agrees to let her mom stay at the nursing home and they go from seeing each other every day to spending their days together on FaceTime.

I would talk to my mother every day on the phone a couple of times a day to call non-stop and and on their calls, her mom would describe how life was starting to change inside the facility.

She said, I don't know what's going on here. There's a lot of running around and it's just different than it was an associate staff and blah, blah, blah. So I was thinking, well, maybe they're sending people to different floors, maybe they're going to training in case they get covid, that was the end of March. Then I didn't hear from my mother and I would call her cell phone. No answer, and I would call her room phone, no answer.

Communications started to break down, Laurie says she was having a hard time getting through to her mom, but also to the staff at the nursing home.

When you finished, you can hang up or press one for more options.

Hello, my name is Laurie Sullivan. My phone number is six three one. You would have to call. Probably two days to get somebody to answer the phone once, and we would ask them anything going on? No, everything's good. Everything's good, don't worry about it. OK, fine. Then we still could not get in touch with her. But then Laurie says she had a series of troubling interactions with the nursing home. Laurie gave me her mom's medical records and recordings of her interactions with the nursing home from the time which support her account.

She got a call from the facility telling her that her mom had fallen out of her wheelchair. Then she got another call that her mom had fallen again, this time out of her bed, and then one of her own calls got through.

Then there was a Sunday, I finally, but I call you all the time, and you don't answer God to my mother.

And I recorded and it did not sound anything at all like my mother.

How do you feel? How do you feel, Mom? Well, I tell her you don't feel good. I still say.

Do you feel sick, Mom? Oh, mom, I do.

You couldn't make out much of what she was saying, but. All right. You know how I was when I worked it out.

I hope to God soon. I mean, you know, we are we are working on it, Mom. It's the whole government lockdown thing.

Oh, you're watching TV, Mom. Yeah. What do you have on. Oh, oh. Oh, Mom. Mom. Lori says she was shocked by the rapid decline in her mom's health. So when I got off the phone, I called the nurse's station and they said something happened to my mom. I don't know if she had a stroke. I don't know what's wrong with her. She's slurring her words. So then I said, hold on.

And she went in and she came back to the phone and she said, Well, you know, I'm fine. They said she's not fine.

And then on April six, she got yet another call from the nursing home.

Then the head doctor had called. And he said. Your mother was found nonresponsive this morning. So I said. What she took to Forbes is that from the fall, did she hit her head? Did she have a stroke? What's going on with my mother? They said no, because I think it's a. He said we did the tests and we got to wait for the results to come back, he said, and it could also be covid-19.

The doctor tells her your mother might have a urinary tract infection or she might have covid-19, which Laurie says is how she first found out that covid had been found in the facility.

And I'm sitting on the back of my cousin and I have him on speakerphone and me and my cousins just looked at each other like you've got to be. I said, wait a minute. When we can get through, we ask every time it's covered in that facility and we are told no, every time. You're telling me that you had to call and tell me that my mother fell out of a wheelchair, you had to call and tell me that my mother fell out of her bed, but you didn't have to call and tell me that covid was in the facility.

Are you fucking kidding me? So. Then I said, OK, so you're testing her for the UTI, I said, testing for Colvert. So he said no. I said, why not? He said she doesn't meet the requirements. I said, which is he said, your mother doesn't have a fever. I said, my mother is sick. I talked to her on Sunday. You're telling me that now there's a chance you might have covid because it's in the building and you're not testing her?

No. OK, I reached out to the nursing home with a detailed list of questions about Lorraine's treatment, but the home declined to comment, citing privacy concerns, and they defended the overall quality of care.

But Laura's description of the doctor's response tracks with how a lot of nursing homes in New York said they handled this moment in the pandemic. covid tests were really hard to come by, even in nursing homes. And so if a patient didn't meet the qualifications to receive a test like running a fever, the facility said they still tried to operate as if the patient might have it.

I haven't seen my mother in weeks and my mother said, I want to know if my mother has called it, I said.

And Laurie says she was not reassured by her conversation with the doctor. She told him she'd like to take her mother out of the facility. His response was essentially, I can't let you do that.

He said, you're not taking your mother. I said, I am taking my mother home. So you said, well, you know, we're not planning a release. I said, my mom is coming up. So. He left it and they were not planning the paperwork, a few hours later, she spoke with the night nurse and she asked him when covid had first been discovered at the facility, and he said it was in March.

I said it was in March before the lockdown or the lockdown. He said after lockdown. And you said the first case of covid was a transfer from Good Samaritan. Which is the hospital next door when my mother started out. It turned out that less than two weeks after Governor Cuomo issued the lockdown of nursing homes, his administration scrambling to free up beds and hospitals, ordered that nursing homes must accept covid positive patients from the hospitals. This was despite objections from some of the nursing homes themselves, which felt unprepared to handle these patients.

And so after Lori had been reassured that our lady of Consolation would be the safest place for her mother with no one other than staff members coming or going. The night nurse was now telling her that a patient with covid had been transferred into the nursing home. It's ultimately impossible to know exactly how covid entered the facility, but at this point, Bori makes up her mind.

So that was April seven. I went to the nursing home. You you physically went there? I physically went there. And even though everything is locked down, it was locked up. And I said, I want to see my mother. We'll be right back. This podcast is supported by Comcast business, the future of work isn't at work at all, it's everywhere. So get the power of the nation's largest gig speed network with Comcast business. It can deliver gig speeds to the most businesses.

So you can do more than bounce back. You can bounce forward restrictions, apply. Call for details. So on April 7th, Lori showed up at the nursing home in person all throughout New York, at this time, the virus was spreading rapidly throughout these facilities. Even nursing homes that had been well staffed before were starting to become overwhelmed. And many workers said they didn't have proper protective equipment as staff members themselves fell ill.

Family members like Lori, who had been trying to reach them, were left feeling totally cut off from information which in Lori's case, letter to show up in person said, I'm sorry, I can't let you in.

I said, No, I'm sorry. I said, you better let me in, because if you don't, I'm going to call every news station and tell them that there is culvert in this building and that nobody is letting families know. It's a people we have not seen our parents, we can't even get to talk to them, nobody answers the phone. Here is covid here and nobody is telling anybody. I said, I will fill your parking lot.

So they let me in, that was how I got in when she got inside, Laurie said she was struck by how empty and how quiet it felt as she made her way through the building to her mom's room on the second floor. She says she only saw a few staffers in the whole wing. And when she got to the room, she noticed a plate of moldy food by her mom's bedside and a water pitcher from another room that made her nervous.

I'm like, how are they even trying to keep covid from spreading? You people aren't even getting the water pitcher straight. And she saw her mom. And and first I thought they were. It looks nothing like my mother, nothing at all. My God, he had to have lost 30 pounds. There was nothing left to her face was sunk in. Her bones were like protruding and her teeth were just hollowed out in her face. So I don't know, until this day, it just was like the head nurse or doctor and.

If he was really nice and I said, my mother's dying. I don't understand how come nobody called me. So she said, well, it's not the policy right now, it would set off like a frenzy, but she didn't use the word frenzy. She said, you know, and we're trying to keep things calm and we're doing the best that we can. I said, you're not doing the best you can do, not because you still haven't tested my mother for college and my mother doesn't even have an I.V. in her arm.

What are you doing for my mother? She's laying in a bed, dying by herself. That's what she's doing. There's nothing there. There's nothing is being done for my mother. So then I said to her, when? Because I felt my mother, you could tell she had a fever, I said, when did my mother. First, get a fever. And we walk out to the floating computer where she pulls up my mother's name and she said April 1st.

I said, April 1st, my mother got a fever, remember the day before, on April 6th, Laurie says the doctor on the phone had told her that her mother could not receive a covid test because she didn't have a fever.

I said, OK. And she denied appropriate tests because the doctor said she didn't have a fever. And today is April 7th and she started her fever April 1st. So nothing is making any sense here. Lori says she left the nursing home with a promise that now they would test her mom for covid. The next day on April 8th, medical records show that Laura's mom received her test. The day after that, lorry got a call notifying her that her mom had tested positive.

April 14th was my mother's birthday, and I was making a cake and I'll leave it at the nurse's station and I'm going to feed my mother some cake. There's no way they're not let me in for a birth. I'm not going to happen. So I got the cake stuff ready and I want to put everything in the oven. And that's when they called me and said, Your mom? Passed away. And that was like nine forty two in the morning or something.

I had just posted on Facebook, it was three minutes before the phone call, you know, happy birthday to mom with the whole little picture collage of our unstuff. But my mother. Was dead, her biggest fear was dying by herself. That's how she spent her last days. There's nothing but guilt because I'm like, I was going to take her out of there. They told me she would be safe there and she died by herself, which was her biggest fear.

Yeah. All day I keep so busy, so busy, so busy when it's time to go to bed. That's all I think. What was she thinking when she was there all by herself when her biggest fear was dying by herself? In the end, almost 70 people in the nursing home died of covid, Laurie helped another woman with a family member in the facility start a Facebook group where people could communicate with one another about their experiences. Many of the family members talked about taking action, possibly suing the nursing home.

Laurie thought about going to a lawyer. But as it turned out, a couple of weeks before Lori's mother's death, something had happened that would make taking action all but impossible, it would be another couple of weeks before the news of it would become public. But in late March, around the same time that Governor Cuomo administration ordered that nursing homes accept covid patients from hospitals, he quietly introduced legislation protecting nursing homes from being held accountable for most covered deaths.

Including the death of Laura's mother. Tomorrow, in part to the story of the Cuomo administration's decisions around nursing homes and the fallout of the last six months. We'll be right back. Anyone who's held down a full time job while working toward the degree will tell you it's not easy, but with Western Governors University, it's more than doable. W.G. Use flexible bachelor's and master's programs were designed with working students in mind, enabling you to fit schooling around your busy schedule, access coursework virtually anywhere, any time as you take control of your education and your future, the best time to start earning a respected degree is always right.

Now go to WTU 82 New York Times to learn more. Here's what else you need to know today, on Monday, the Supreme Court rejected a last ditch attempt by former President Trump to shield his financial records from prosecutors in New York. The case revolves around a subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance, to Trump's accountant for tax records and financial statements. Since 2011, Trump has repeatedly sought to block Vance from obtaining the records. But with Monday's ruling, the accountant now has no choice but to turn the records over.

And today, we mark a truly grim, heartbreaking milestone. Five hundred thousand seventy one dead.

In a speech on Monday night from the White House, President Biden marked the milestone of more than half a million deaths in the U.S. from the pandemic.

I know it's hard. I promise you. I know it's hard. I remember. But that's how you heal. You have to remember.

Invoking his own experience with tragedy, Biden counseled the country not to move on, but instead to honor and mourn the dead, those who have lost loved ones. This is what I know. They're never truly gone to always be part of your heart.

Today's episode was produced by Jessica Chung, it was edited by Lisa Tobin, Michael Benowa and Anita Badajoz and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily, I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow. What makes your morning a good morning, no matter what your routine entails, one thing rings true. The perfect morning is one that readies your body and mind for the day ahead. So give yourself a good morning. Take a moment just for you. Release yourself from the worries of yesterday and face today refreshed because good days start with good mornings and good morning.

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