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March 18, 2021 Dutchess County officials respond to nursing home scandal
Alex Wilson
Assistant news Editor
In the past month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has found himself embroiled in controversy after evidence emerged that he allegedly misreported nursing home deaths across New York state. As Albany wades through these allegations, Dutchess County continues working to protect the nursing home residents that critics charge were endangered by Cuomo.
Last month, the state Department of Health (DOH) updated Dutchess County’s tally of 96 nursing home deaths to include the deaths of residents who died outside of the facility. At that point, Dutchess County had a total of 155 nursing home-related COVID-19 deaths, 59 of which occurred outside of these facilities—usually in hospitals. As of March 3, the total number of nursing home deaths in the county had increased to 169.
Among local leaders, a more deeply-seated frustration with the governor’s earlier COVID-19 policymaking underlies the recent anger concerning his incorrect reporting of nursing home coronavirus deaths.
This frustration has been pointed towards Cuomo’s March directive to compel nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients. While debates concerning this decision have taken center stage since it was announced last spring, more recent DOH reports indicate that the number of coronavirus patients admitted to nursing homes was over 40 percent higher than previously reported, at over 9,000. Although the intention of the policy was to move medically stable patients out of hospitals and ease pressure on overburdened medical facilities, some—including State Assemblymember Jonathan Jacobson (D)—saw it as an excessive risk for nursing homes.
Jacobson, whose district includes the City of Poughkeepsie, wrote to DOH Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker last April urging him to reverse the directive. In his letter, he wrote: “Nursing homes are simply not equipped to act as hospitals and should not be used as depositories for infected individuals. Instead, they should rehabilitate in a facility specifically designated for recovering COVID-19 patients and separate from any nursing homes or anywhere large populations of elderly residents are housed.”
The Dutchess County Department of Behavioral & Community Health (DBCH) also expressed concern with the policy’s implementation, explaining via email that “Facilities like nursing homes and assisted living facilities are generally at higher risk of disease spread. Congregate living, staff issues (turnover, overworked, lack of training and assistance) and lack of support these facilities get from the State all increase the risk of spreading something like COVID-19.” With issues such as staffing shortages that the state failed to foresee or provide support for, DBCH says that ultimately, the policy was difficult to implement.
As to whether the state, more broadly, has taken the appropriate steps to protect residents of nursing homes, leaders are in greater disagreement.
Brendan Lawler (D), who represents Hyde Park in the Dutchess County Legislature, said in an interview that the state has recently taken the correct steps to protect these facilities, citing the priority that residents and staff receive for vaccinations, as well as increased availability of personal protective equipment. Jacobson said that the Democratic-led state legislature has taken “a great first step” to dealing with the problems in the nursing home system that the pandemic has revealed. This first step includes reforms such as A.3922-A, which aims to create a task force to examine the toll that the pandemic has taken on long-term care facilities, and A.5846, which requires that adult care facilities include infection control in their quality assurance plans.
Still, DBCH maintained that the state’s response was flawed, saying, “The lack of clear, consistent and concise guidance from the State has been problematic for nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Additionally, the State did not always communicate with the local health department regarding their visits or reviews of these state licensed facilities.” The department says that Dutchess County led the way for appropriate nursing home support, and that despite state objections, they demanded testing of the asymptomatic (the state later decided to require this testing statewide).
Furthermore, they established a taskforce to assist nursing homes that consisted of personnel from DCBH, the Office of Aging and the Planning Department, while also supporting facilities attempting to receive state guidance, distributing PPE and assisting in the vaccination process.
Despite this increased workload, Lawler explained that DCBH was forced to cope with a 15 percent reduction in staff after this year’s county budget slashed the department’s budget by over $2.5 million, roughly five percent of its annual appropriation.
Lawler, who was a private citizen at the time of the budget’s passage, voiced his opposition to the measure. “Hopefully, with the funding from the American Rescue Plan we will be able to restore full funding to [DCBH] to provide the necessary resources to continue to fight the pandemic,” he said.
While Dutchess County works towards the protection of its nursing home residents, the state continues to grapple with the political future of Cuomo, who—besides the fallout of the nursing home scandal—is also facing a growing number of sexual assault allegations.
Amid this wave of allegations following close on the heels of the nursing home scandal, more members of the governor’s own party began to turn against him after NYS Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D) called for Cuomo’s resignation and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D) authorized the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee to begin an impeachment inquiry.
Jacobson joined the growing bipartisan group of officials representing Dutchess County, including Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer (both D), Representatives Sean Patrick Maloney and Antonio Delgado (both D), NYS Senator Sue Serino (R) and Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro (R), who have called for the governor’s resignation.
While clarifying his stance that the underreporting of nursing home deaths alone is not cause for Cuomo’s resignation, Lawler explained that “The governor’s handling of the scandal demonstrates a failure of leadership. There is no logical reason that the number of deaths in residential care facilities was not fully reported. The state legislature should further curtail the governor's emergency powers and make policy changes based on the results of the attorney general’s report when it is completed.”
As of last m0nth, several of the county’s elder care facilities, such as Fiddlers Green Manor and Wingate at Beacon, had surpassed 20 COVID-19 deaths and The Pines at Poughkeepsie was nearing 30. With such high mortality rates at stake, officials seem to agree on one thing: There is a dire need for meaningful elder care safety solutions.
Vaccine Equity Coalition advocates for fair vaccine distribution
Continued from VACCINE on page 1
Americans make up 11.2 percent of the adult population, only 6.2 percent of vaccine recipients are African American. Only seven percent of vaccinated Dutchess County residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, compared to 11.2 percent of all adult residents.
Disparities in vaccination rates are the result of a myriad of factors.
On Feb. 26, the Vassar Community Care Team released a lecture focused on COVID-19 related racial health disparities. The event, which was co-sponsored by the ALANA Center, Student Growth and Engagement, Africana Studies department, Science Technology and Society department and the Transitions Program, included opening comments by Biology Professor Leroy Cooper followed by a presentation by Dr. Alexis Johnson, MD, MPH. Johnson works as an Emergency Department Physician at Westchester Medical Center and Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital. The lecture was moderated by Tiana Headley ’22 [Full Disclosure: Headley is a Senior Editor for the Miscellany News].
They described the factors that contribute to disparities in vaccine access, including geographical location, technological access, scheduling flexibility and financial resources. For example, in a vaccine registration system facing massive demand, individuals who lack technological knowledge or resources are vulnerable to slipping through the cracks. Cooper noted that residents without reliable internet access may miss out on the opportunity to register for open vaccination appointments that are often filled quickly.
Additionally, Johnson identified that people of color may be fearful of receiving the vaccine given the long history of medical abuse against minoritized communities. Johnson shared, “I do think that fear and caution is a big factor, from my own personal experience in my family, I know that that’s the case.” Cooper connected skepticism surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine with a general sense of misgiving towards the medical establishment. “A lot of it goes back to whole-sale distrust in the medical healthcare system, period, for African Americans,” said Cooper.
Johnson and Cooper emphasized the disproportionate toll that the pandemic has taken on communities of color, as reflected in nationwide hospitalization and death rates. Although Black and Latino Americans are only slightly more likely to contract COVID than white Americans, larger racial disparities are seen in hospitalization and fatality rates. Compared to white Americans, Black, Hispanic and Latino Americans are approximately three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and are approximately twice as likely to die. Native Americans are nearly twice as likely to contract COVID-19 and nearly four times as likely to be hospitalized with the virus, compared with white Americans.
The Vaccine Equity Coalition has already identified several starting points to addressing racial disparities in vaccine access. The coalition aims to create more pop-up vaccination sites that are geographically accessible to underserved communities.
At a recent pop-up vaccination site at Beulah Baptist Church in Poughkeepsie, all 450 vaccination appointments were successfully filled. Additionally, the coalition will work to distribute materials provided by the Dutchess County Department of Behavioral & Community Health to address misinformation about the vaccine. “Focusing on hard-to-reach populations is critically important to the county, and we are committed to continuing this effort,” emphasized Molinaro.
Page 5 Student photo club Phocus focuses on accessibility
Massimo Tarridas
Columnist
For many members of Vassar’s student photography club Phocus, the best camera in the world is a disposable point-andshoot. Elitism within the art world has always existed, but photography—superseded only by film—is one of the most difficult to enter in this regard. Cameras are prohibitively expensive, lenses even more so; before digital, 36 pictures were all that you got per roll, and that’s not including the cost of developing and printing. As Phocus’ darkroom manager, it may be strange to hear me wax on about these cameras, which have to be shipped to labs for development. However, to actively glamorize point-andshoots is an act which spits in the face of this hierarchy, lowering the cost of photography into the realm of the feasible. Accessibility is the standard by which we conduct ourselves.
Perhaps the prime example of this is FIX, our annual publication. As FIX Co-editor Alex Garza ’23 describes it, “FIX is an annual photo journal, a platform to publish a diverse set of photo works from the whole Vassar student body. The publication showcases different formats of shooting—film, digital, color and black and white.” Phocus is expecting to begin accepting submissions via email as soon as possible with a deadline set for after spring break. FIX is not just for members of the club; absolutely anyone can submit, and even though the editorial process is thorough in its aesthetic demands, I have yet to see someone who was denied a spot at the table. We also create projects such as Take Photo Don’t Steal, where disposable cameras are placed around campus with eponymous signs. Anyone can take a picture, creating a beautiful anonymity which preserves the democratic nature of the project, as well as highlighting the somewhat fleeting nature of documentary photography. Once archived, who will remember the names of those who took selfies on cheap plastic cameras one fall day at Vassar?
The club also serves as an intermediary between other campus events and the student body. One such event is an upcoming Jade Parlor exhibit, curated by Cassie Jain ’20 as the Loeb’s Post-Baccalaureate Curatorial Fellow. Within this space, Jain says, “I’m hoping the exhibit is an opportunity for current Vassar students to take agency over the ambiguous history of the Jade Parlor by showing work about their own identities…acknowledging its past as a space dedicated to international students and questioning why no one knows why it had orientalizing aesthetics.” This exhibit offers an opportunity for students to have their work professionally printed and framed—a valuable moment of validation. As Phocus treasurer Laila Barcenas-Meade ’22 elaborates on the benefits of Phocus’ exhibitions and FIX, “Seeing the things I make in print is a pretty amazing feeling … It’s like, your artwork is valuable. You have talent. You can show that to the world and be proud of what you’re doing.”
If the services that Phocus provides seem generous for the average college club, it’s because they have to be in order to make up for the college’s minimal offering of photography-related courses. Advisor to Phocus and supervisor of the Baldeck Photographic Center Monica Church works with the club’s executive board in order to achieve its goal, which include bringing in contemporary photographers to speak, having workshops, creating a Phocus archive, making zines, attending regional conferences, as well as keeping the darkroom and photographic center open to anyone looking to loan out a camera. Last year, when I joined Phocus as darkroom apprentice, I took advantage of every single one of these opportunities. And as darkroom manager this year, I have worked alongside Church to make sure that they continue to be available. We’ve made the darkroom a safe space by setting up an online scheduling system to reserve time slots and establishing health practices, such as making it an absolute requirement to use gloves when working with the equipment. In some ways, the darkroom is more suited than other spaces to adhere to COVID guidelines; for example, its ventilation system, which was originally installed to remove chemical fumes, also helps to circulate airflow, reducing the possibility of contamination. Similarly, moving everything online has had its own silver lining, making it easier for our club to bring photography-based artists—who would previously never have been able to come to Vassar—to speak for Phocus. These talks are both autobiographical and instructive, as the artist speaks about their own work and then critiques a selection of student photography.
Barcenas-Meade describes the impact Phocus has had on her experience this year, explaining that “I think one of the most important things that Phocus has done is [encourage] me to continue photography, which can sometimes be a very solitary pursuit … Hanging out with other people who have completely different styles and completely different approaches has been helpful to my own craft.” Many of the club’s meetings are dedicated to critical sessions, where everyone in attendance can receive constructive feedback on their photography. As people come again and again to these critiques, Phocus has forged a strong sense of community and familiarity. We can track each other’s progress and notice themes within our peers’s work, as reinforcement and advice is shared equally by all. I stated earlier that FIX might be a prime example of the egalitarian nature of Phocus, but I might have to contradict myself. FIX is a magazine, and as such is a perfect example of what Phocus can do for the socially distant era. The public image of photography itself is one of solitude. The iconic photographers are all lone wolves. A single student invested under the glow of the safelight, enjoying the magic of paper and chemistry. But now, the image that comes to mind of what Phocus should be is one where we’re sitting together around a round table, sharing what moves us about the images flickering on screen.
Phocus is a photography group on campus that focuses on accessibility and creating a community for photographers on campus. Courtesy of Igor Martiniouk '24.
March 18, 2021 Writer-in-Residence's prose deems attention a form of love
Bryn Marling
Copy Staff
In a moment where decrying our global dystopia is a pedestrian pastime, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and his prose have never indulged in hopelessness. I first heard Adjei-Brenyah speak when I was 15. As Colgate University’s 2017 Olive B. Cooper Fellow, he delivered what would become the titular story of his PEN Award-winning debut collection, “Friday Black.” Since then, the succinct cruelty and compassion of his writing have captivated me. The day after his 30th birthday and the submission of his first novel, I finally had the chance to speak over Zoom to Vassar’s 2021 Writer-in-Residence about how these themes manifest in his life and art.
Adjei-Brenyah’s voice is uncompromising throughout the collection as he surgically deconstructs the absurd logic that informs a culture of consumerism, racist violence and apocalypses big and small. He deploys his words like a series of funhouse mirrors— funny, grotesque and always far too close to reality. When asked about his attraction to his form of choice, Adjei-Brenyah responded, “You can’t hide in a short story.” This mindset is evident in the intensity of his writing, yet his work also makes the argument that you can’t hide from a short story either. Rather, readers of “Friday Black” are forcibly discomforted as they reckon with how they participate in these systems of dehumanization.
Adjei-Brenyah went through a similar experience during his six-year stint as a salesperson in the malls of upstate New York. He would work opening to closing, devise stories on the late night bus ride home and write until morning. Discussing his motivation during this period and what it taught him about the dynamic between our economic productivity and our individual worth, he said, “I wanted to feel like I could be excellent in some sort of space, which is a very normal desire. I think capitalism is really good at getting you to think that by default you are not worthy. Prove it to me, not only that you’re a good salesperson, but prove to me that you’re a good person. That’s the sort of inherent argument of our system: unless you produce at a certain level, we will literally let you die. So, we’re taught from the beginning this very transactional mode of existence.” He went on to analyze how this mode of existence also diminishes our interpersonal relationships, saying, “The negative thing about it is that it teaches you to view people as a means— it teaches you to view people as things you finesse to get resources as opposed to human beings." The relationship between the chameleon skill of customer service and the concept of code-switching that Adjei-Brenyah visualizes in the collection’s first story as a 10-point Blackness scale is particularly compelling. I asked how this played into his approach to doing a residence at a predominantly white institution (PWI) like Vassar. “I won’t change my persona or demeanor to fit the space,” he said. He continued, “But one of the things I do know how to do, and how I had the access to even write that book, I know how to move around and be whatever the audience wants me to be. The thing is, I choose not to, and that’s a privilege afforded to me because of how people identify with me because of the book.”
Despite the need to conform and finesse, Adjei-Brenyah said that especially in the sales environment, unexpected moments of intimacy sustained him. He recalled helping a woman find plain gray clothes for her
incarcerated partner: “It wasn’t a big deal for what I was doing, but it was something that was a big deal for her. It gave me the opportunity to break out of that sort of fleece attitude that is the default you need to get by in that space and to remember that every single person has a story, every single person is a human being. They’re not a means to an end, they’re an end to themselves. I learned early on to attach to those moments. Not particularly because I was some cool sort of empathetic person, but because I needed to survive because I hated the job.”
Adjei-Brenyah’s appraisal of his mindset as a writer at this time jarringly resonates in the day-to-day monotony and cataclysm of pandemic living. “At the beginning, I made the mistake of feeling like my life is not interesting, this place is boring and therefore there are no stories here,” he admitted. To young people living through a period in which it can feel like the scope of life has been narrowed, he said, “This time is not a wash. It’s probably the opposite. It’s not like those years didn’t count; they count a lot if you look at it right.”
Looked at from this angle, creative expression becomes another way of surviving and defending our humanity. “Anything you imagine, you possess,” reads the book’s epigraph, quoting a Kendrick Lamar verse in School Boy Q’s “Blessed.” Given the collection’s exploration of the close relationship between property ownership and our understanding of safety, authority and value, I was curious about how the act of writing could be a similar means of possession. Adjei-Brenyah explained, “The reason I do writing is because it’s something I can do that’s free and no one can take away from me. So, all writing, if it’s not an act of possession, it subverts the traditional relationship to possessions. That’s one of my favorite things about it. It’s something that’s mine and can’t be taken. I can make a whole world, and where else is that true?”
Adjei-Brenyah envisions not-so-distant futures infused with surrealism and satire, although the author strains against the hierarchies such labelling enforces. In an age of deadened language, words tossed around as glibly as “surreal” have lost their original potency. I wondered if Adjei-Brenyah felt a similar desensitization as he approached writing in an era becoming continually uncanny in character. He explained, “It’s not about the grade of strangeness, but also about the delivery of it and the way it unfolds. So for me [writing during surreal times] is not harder because there are a lot of other considerations I make besides the surreal-ness of it, that render it what people call surreal. The overlap between what you call reality and what you might call surreal is the strength of it, not a weakness.”
He imagines that someday he might explore the concept of utopia, too, saying, “I look forward to a time when this whole age of humanity is considered a dark period and they look at us with grace—because you do need to have grace with yourself and others—but also huge shame. Would they even understand us? It’s a scary premise because how much of what I understand as humanity requires interpersonal harm. I know that love is real and I’m advocating for more of that, but there’s this other side too. What would that take? What would that look like? And what, if anything, would be lost?”
For now, though, Adjei-Brenyah’s characters struggle to assert themselves in systems that not only demand the devaluation of human lives but also use language to legitimize the suffering they cause. Adjei-Brenyah’s prose exploits the ubiquity of euphemism in neoliberal society, exposing a world of corpses and corporate-ese to sobering effect. I was curious about his fascination with these artificial vocabularies. “If you deaden your language enough, you can say anything and not feel bad for it,” he explained. “All oppressive governments have a way of speaking that implicates anyone but themselves and infantilizes the people.” However, as is custom for Adjei-Brenyah, he again emphasized the impact of these tactics on our personal relationships, continuing, “I think with the people who hurt or harm or murder, they’re doing that on a personal level—trying to find a way of being okay with the horror they’ve unleashed. Language is a way of navigating that with yourself and with others.”
It’s clear that Adjei-Brenyah wants us to reject these linguistic coping mechanisms and the easy callousness they offer. “Friday Black” asks: How can we avoid becoming sadists while living in sadistic times? I posed the same question back to the author. “Part of the answer is yes. That’s why these stories exist,” began Adjei Brenyah. “To me it comes down to a deep humanism. Just being unwilling to negotiate someone else’s humanity or your own—something has to be sacred. That’s the core of abolitionist thought—there’s the slogan, ‘Where life is precious, life is precious’—if we have a cultural life which isn’t precious for some, we can’t have that on the table at all.” Here is where the unusual brilliance of Adjei-Brenyah’s writing lies: Cynical, but never cruel, his stories urge an appreciation for what is precious.
Adjei-Brenyah does more than plead for a better future. Taking inspiration from Solmaz Sharif’s poetry collection, “Look,” he offered instructions on restoring our estimation of human value: “If you think about the attention you pay to someone you love— or anything you love—if you can pay that level of attention to anything, you’ll be able to understand it so deeply and it will be very difficult to hate it.
To me, close reading is an act of generosity and grace that allows you to love the world better and participate more actively.” For the writer, attention—whether to the needs of a department store customer or to the subtle rhythms of a sentence—is an act of care.
‘The Pull of the Stars’ provides solace with story of 1918 pandemic
Naima Saini
Guest Columnist
It’s human nature to look for media that we can relate to, especially in stressful times like the ones we’re living in now. Because of this, creators of all different art forms have produced quarantine-inspired pieces, musings on life in the pandemic and stories about people experiencing these unprecedented times. For instance, in August 2020, a miniseries called “Love in the Time of Corona'' came out on Freeform. The show follows several different households navigating quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic and delves into the challenges it poses to their relationships. I’m sure the series is interesting, but I knew that I would not be watching it from the moment I first found out about it—it felt a little too real.
I instead picked up Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory,” which I had read last spring. The story follows a woman living through an imagined future pandemic. I had to put the book down, though, because it filled me with such an immediate sense of dread, even though I had started rereading it precisely because of its connections to COVID. It turns out that reading about the current moment and reading about an imagined future where we’re still isolated from one another are not comforting. However, many of us still seek solace in stories about people in similar situations to our own. I experienced this when I read “The Pull of the Stars.”
“The Pull of the Stars” by Emma Donoghue is about the 1918 flu pandemic. Set in Ireland, the book follows nurse Julia Power as she oversees a special hospital ward for women who are both pregnant and sick with the flu. Though it takes place over a short period of time, every moment that Julia spends caring for her patients is a matter of life and death. Donoghue also delves into the social inequalities that are affecting patients, healthcare workers and the greater Dublin community.
Along the way, Julia meets Bridie Sweeney, a hospital volunteer to whom she is immediately drawn. The two women work alongside each other and form one of the central relationships of the novel. As they care for their patients, their friendship develops and they confront their troubled pasts amid the background of their shared work.
Many elements of the characters’ experiences are unsurprisingly very relevant today, such as the signs issued by authorities urging the public not to gather with people outside their households. At one point, Julia admits, “I was having trouble foreseeing any future. How would we ever get back to normal after the pandemic?”
I will admit that as I was reading, I found some of the parallels to the present situation to be a little heavy-handed. Obviously the book is historically accurate, but it clearly felt like it had been written to point out the connections between the flu pandemic and the current pandemic. But after reading the novel, I discovered that Emma Donoghue started writing it in 2018, well before COVID-19 was first documented, and finished in March 2020. Its publication was fast-tracked once it became clear just how relevant it was.
I don’t know if I can characterize this as a comfort read—it takes place in the middle of a pandemic, after all. The characters face serious, high-stakes issues, and not all of them survive. At the same time, there are many hopeful notes; the relationships that people build with each other, whether they are friendships, romances or chosen families, are incredibly strong and valuable. And while many of the societal problems apparent in the book still exist today, it is striking to be reminded of how far we’ve come in terms of technology and modern medicine.
If you crave literature that reminds you of the current moment but don’t want to read another COVID story, I recommend “The Pull of the Stars.”
As Donoghue’s characters do, you might find solace in the fact that the very modern-seeming problems we’re facing are not new: “The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.”
