Wisconsin Congressman Scott Fitzgerald demanded answers Tuesday from Governor Tony Evers as to why COVID-19 deaths in long-term care facilities were dramatically undercounted. The Evers Administration announced last week that it had quietly updated the numbers of nursing home residents who died over the past year from 1,956 to 2,927. 1,726 deaths remain unclassified and the Evers Administration would not say how many of those were long-term care residents.
"This goes back to last March," said Fitzgerald, who at the time was Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader and held daily phone calls with the Governor's staff, during which it updated legislative leaders on the spread of the virus. "The one thing that jumped out at me, and I know I talked to other legislators about this, too, was that the Wisconsin Hospitals Association, who eventually went live with a dashboard with a nice setup that said, 'Here's where we're at, here's where the Wisconsin hospitals are,' and then we had separate numbers which were related to nursing homes and to assisted living.
"The thing that could never add up was why were the deaths much higher [than the number of COVID patients in intensive care]? But the ICU numbers didn't correlate with that? So we kept asking, 'Are these people going directly from the nursing home to the funeral home?'"
Fitzgerald told "The Dan O'Donnell Show" Tuesday that he never could get a straight answer from the Evers Administration on the discrepancy. Fitzgerald was elected to Congress in November and has now joined the other four members of Wisconsin's Republican delegation in sending a letter to Governor Evers demanding a thorough accounting of the manner in which COVID-19 deaths were counted and classified over the past year.
"The Evers Administration’s failure to accurately classify these deaths may have impeded the State’s ability to target medical resources toward long-term care facilities and better inform Wisconsin’s vaccination program, possibly costing lives," Fitzgerald wrote. "The Evers Administration must answer for these shortfalls and provide more transparency."
Click on the player below to listen to Congressman Fitzgerald's complete interview with Dan O'Donnell and click here to subscribe to "The Dan O'Donnell Show" on iHeartRadio!