Nursing Homes Face Growing Number of Lawsuits From COVID-19 Fallout

By Jacob Gershman

Dozens of lawsuits are being filed in New York and around the country by families of nursing home residents who died from COVID-19. The suits claim the nursing homes failed to properly stem the spread of the disease, identify infected patients, and treat them. Less than two months after the first presumed COVID-19 death at a New York nursing home, the disease had taken the lives of more than 6,500 nursing home residents — a figure much higher than initially indicated. New York malpractice attorney Joseph L. Ciaccio said his firm, Napoli Shkolnik PLLC, recently filed nearly 50 lawsuits against nursing homes. "We're trying to preserve the claims for our clients before running out of time," he said. The statute of limitations for wrongful death in New York and many other states is two years from the date of death. Prior to pursuing the suits, the law firm had to obtain medical records and wait for the appointment of estate administrators to act as legal representatives on behalf of heirs of the decedent. Courts now must determine how much blame rests with the owners of the nursing homes, with some legal observers noting the difficulty of proving a causal link between reported lapses in infection control and the deaths in an older, frail population. Nina Kohn, an elder-law scholar at Syracuse University College of Law, adds that plaintiffs may find it hard to show that a nursing facility's actions were to blame for a resident's death, "because the virus is so easily transmissible without contact."

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