Four New York City hotels that were supposed to house those recovering from COVID-19 stood nearly empty last week as possibly infected homeless people packed subway cars, and nursing homes were forced to take in patients recovering from the bug.
As of 4 a.m. Monday, the LaGuardia Plaza Hotel in Queens had 10 occupants and the Aloft next to it had 11 while a Hampton Inn and a Hilton Garden Inn in undisclosed locations in the city had no guests, according to a NYC Health + Hospitals document viewed by The Post.
Together the four hotels had 1,096 rooms and just 21 occupants, the document said.
“It’s infuriating and morally disgusting,” said Annie Caraforo, an activist with Neighbors Together, a Brooklyn social services and advocacy group. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and we need to be taking all of the safety precautions we can to make sure people can safely socially isolate and keep themselves healthy.”
It was unclear if the Hilton Garden Inn was the same “quarantine hotel” near Times Square where three men died last month after being released from the hospital to continue their coronavirus recoveries.
Mayor de Blasio announced last month the city would set aside 11,000 hotel rooms for residents who were battling the coronavirus but lived in crowded conditions and wanted to isolate, and for health care workers who did not want to infect their families.
The Health + Hospitals corporation said it only managed three hotels and not the Hilton Garden Inn, which was under the city Emergency Management department’s purview.
“The hotel space allows patients to recover from the virus and self-isolate appropriately, minimizing the risk of transmission to others without compromising the quality of patient care,” the agency said.
At the 308-room LaGuardia Plaza, there were at least 17 nurses on duty early in the week to care for less than 12 people, according to an insider who said there were also H+H employees and contract staffers, including social workers, at the site.
Most of the nurses were provided through Krucial Staffing, a Kansas-based company that has said it would pay RNs $10,000 a week to work in New York City during the coronavirus outbreak.
“They were working in an empty hotel with no patients,” the insider said. “They’re making massive money.”
Krucial Staffing would not comment on what it was paying the nurses and H+H declined to say how much the hiring had cost.
All but four nurses had left by Wednesday, but the number of patients admitted rose to 17 by Friday, the insider said.
And the nurses are only allowed to take the temperatures of the few hotel “guests” under their care, the source said. If an emergency arose, they are instructed to forgo CPR and call 911.
The insider described a supposedly “COVID negative” floor for patients who had tested negative for the bug even if their tests happened weeks before their arrival and they had come from a homeless shelter.
“Nurses and other staff then interact with these ‘COVID negative’ people — whose COVID status we cannot possibly know — without proper PPE,” the source said.
Guests must leave after 14 days, and some re-enter the shelter system, “putting themselves at immediate risk of repeated COVID-19 exposure and putting all at risk of transmission if they are still positive for COVID,” the insider said. It makes “the entire hotel program meaningless — it pretends to solve a problem that it has no effect on,” the insider added.
The hospital system said stays could be extended as needed and that just under 30 nurses were at all three hotels and they were allowed to administer CPR.
Advocates on Thursday called for the city to provide 30,000 hotel rooms for the homeless.
“This virus has already been allowed to spread for weeks and will continue to infect people and overwhelm the whole hospital system, putting everyone at risk,” said Joe Loonam, the housing campaign coordinator for VOCAL-New York, a grassroots advocacy group.
The de Blasio Administration said as of Friday 4,900 people, including medical personnel and those recovering from COVID-19, were in hotels managed by the city’s Emergency Management department and an additional 6,000 or so homeless residents were also being housed in hotels.
“As we move into this next phase of this crisis and as hospitalizations hopefully decrease, hotels remain a key component of our test and trace plan,” said spokeswoman Laura Feyer.
Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent
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