This is the fifth installment of The Paper Trail — a series built on primary sources, documented records, and the discipline of following evidence wherever it leads. Not each article is in chronological order because the order of publication is not necessary to see the web of corruption among powerful people. Start anywhere. The thread connects everything.
I had known Anna long enough to know that if our eyes met while I was preaching, it was finished. Something in her receives the Holy Spirit the way a field receives rain, openly, completely, and if I looked at her when the Spirit was moving I would cry my way through the rest of whatever I was trying to say. It happened often. She was that kind of soul-sister.
The first day we were allowed to worship together again, I was standing at the door of the church wearing a mask and dispensing hand sanitizer, a substance I knew was doing no one any good, into hands belonging to people who were desperate simply to be in the same room with God and each other. I stood there because I loved my ministry. People had been begging to come back. This was the price of the door being open, so I paid it, hating every moment of bowing to what I knew was not right.
Then I saw Anna’s kind blue eyes, filled to the brim, behind a masked face.
I set the hand sanitizer down.
Can we hug, I asked.
She nodded.
When we embraced, our entire bodies shuddered. The weight of everything that had been taken, every ordinary moment of human contact that had been legislated away, came out of both of us at once. We held each other and we sobbed.
She was the first non-relative I had hugged in six months. I will never forget that moment.
My second-born daughter had purchased her prom dress two weeks before the world shut down. It was gorgeous. It hung in her closet through the spring while the date came and went without ceremony, without a gymnasium, without a single photograph in a backyard with friends. Just a dress and a date on the calendar that passed like any other day.
She was homeschooled, so her education continued. What didn’t continue was everything else. When graduation came, we sat on the couch together with a bowl of popcorn and watched the ceremony on television. Names and pictures flashed across the screen one by one. Congratulations, Hayley. You just graduated.
That was it. That was the ceremony. A screen and a couch and popcorn because there was nothing else available to us.
After a few weeks, by April, the cabin fever became something physical. Like a pressure in the walls. We decided one afternoon to simply take a drive, not to go anywhere or accomplish anything, just to move through the world like human beings for an hour. What we drove through looked like the end of life. Empty streets. Closed storefronts. A ghost town made of a place we had known our whole lives.
And we were tense. Genuinely, physically tense. Afraid of being pulled over for driving down a public road in America. Afraid that the act of not being locked inside our house might be enough to bring consequences down on us.
That fear was not entirely irrational. It was the logical response to what was being communicated from every official channel available: stay home, stay safe, and do not ask questions about either instruction.
We were healthy and alive. And afraid to drive.
I was working for a church during this time. Of course, we were completely closed for months. The leadership decided to manage its congregation on what I can only describe as a traffic light spectrum. Greens were those of us — like me — who opposed the lockdown, the masks, all of it, and were ready to return to normal life. Yellows were cautious. Reds were the ones who would have stationed guards at the entrance of every public place if given the authority. The Reds held quite a bit of authority as it turned out.
A church. A body of believers gathered around the premise that all people stand equally before God. It color-coded its members by their willingness to be afraid.
I was green. Green meant problem.
The suppression of counter-messages that the Event 201 recommendation called for did not operate only at the level of social media platforms and hospital privileges. It operated in churches across America. It operated on ordinary people who asked reasonable questions and paid for asking them.
The liquor stores stayed open, though.
Now let’s talk about the people who couldn’t drive anywhere. The ones who couldn’t leave at all. The ones who had pressed their own hands against their own windows and watched the world go quiet outside. The ones whose families stood in parking lots and held up handwritten signs because there was no other way to be seen by the people they loved.
While my daughter’s prom dress hung in her closet, while my family drove through ghost towns afraid of being arrested for moving, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California were signing directives that would send COVID-positive patients into the buildings where the most vulnerable people in America lived and could not leave.
In New York, the order came on March 25, 2020.
It was addressed to nursing home administrators, directors of nursing, and hospital discharge planners. It stated, in the language of the New York State Department of Health, that all nursing homes must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals. It stated that no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to a nursing home solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. It stated that nursing homes were prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.
Read that again.
They were prohibited from testing a person before their entry into nursing homes full of fragile people.
More than 9,000 COVID-positive patients were sent into hundreds of New York nursing homes under that order. More than 6,000 of those were new admissions, not returning residents. The order remained in effect until May 10, 2020.
The day after Cuomo signed it, a prominent national coalition of long-term care professionals publicly denounced it. They warned, in their own published statement, that it wasn’t consistent with science or patient safety principles. They called it a short-term and short-sighted solution that would only add to the surge.
Howard Zucker, New York’s Health Commissioner, later testified under oath that he had no knowledge of those warnings. State Senator Tom O’Mara, who questioned him directly, said he did not believe him then and did not believe him after.
By June 7, 2020, the data was already inside the building.
An internal email to Commissioner Zucker that day contained charts showing that nursing homes which had admitted COVID-positive patients under the March 25 order were dying at a rate of 8.1 percent. Homes that had admitted no such patients were dying at a rate of 4.1 percent. Half.
They had the numbers and then they wrote a report that said something different.
On July 6, 2020, the New York State Department of Health released its official findings. The report concluded that the March 25 admission policy was not a significant factor in nursing home fatalities. Andrew Cuomo held a press conference. He said the criticism of nursing home deaths had no basis in fact. He said it was pure politics and it was ugly politics.
Someone inside his own administration had already written, in an internal email, that the mandatory admittance policy was going to be a great debacle in the history books. The same email asked: don’t you see how bad this is? Or do we admit error and give up?
In January 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James released her own investigation. She found that Cuomo had understated COVID-19 deaths in state nursing homes by as much as fifty percent.
Then came the admission that explains everything else.
Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, privately told Democratic lawmakers what had happened. She said the administration had frozen. She said they were not sure if what they were going to give to the Department of Justice was going to be used against them politically.
The deaths were real, the cover was political, and the data was buried because it was inconvenient to the people who had generated it.
Fauci, in July 2020, while the cover-up was active and the true death toll was still hidden, publicly called New York’s COVID response a model. He said they did it correctly.
New York had 14,450 deaths across 698 long-term care facilities. Twenty-one deaths per facility. Arizona, which never issued a must-admit order, had 2,505 deaths across 1,000 facilities. Two and a half deaths per facility. Same country. Same virus. Same year. Different decision.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing in 2023 titled Like Fire Through Dry Grass. Witnesses testified that it was known from the early data and science that COVID-19 would be lethal in elderly care facilities. Witnesses testified that state officials prioritized personal political gain over the health of elderly Americans. In October 2024, the subcommittee referred Cuomo to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. A criminal investigation was opened in 2025.
Meanwhile the Navy had sent two hospital ships.
The USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed vessel with a 1,200-member crew, arrived in New York Harbor on March 30, 2020. The USNS Mercy, its sister ship, docked in Los Angeles the same week. They were deployed, at enormous cost, as relief valves for hospitals overwhelmed by the surge. The justification for the nursing home directives, in every state that issued them, was that hospitals needed to free up beds. The crisis demanded it. There was no choice.
The Comfort left New York on May 2, 2020. It had treated 182 patients.
The Mercy left Los Angeles on May 15. It had treated 77.
At the height of the crisis, the two ships combined had fewer than 20 patients on board. The head of New York’s largest hospital system called it a joke. He said it was pretty ridiculous. He asked what the purpose was.
The ships sat empty in the harbors of the two hardest-hit cities in America while COVID-positive patients, untested, were being sent by order of law into buildings full of people who could not leave.
Now, follow the money.
Under the CARES Act, signed into law March 27, 2020, the federal government paid hospitals a 20% bonus on the entire Medicare bill for every patient designated as a COVID case. A standard pneumonia admission without COVID generated approximately $7,700. With a COVID designation, that same admission generated over $9,200. A patient requiring ventilator support without COVID generated approximately $40,000. With COVID, the enhanced rate applied on top.
Dr. Scott Jensen, a physician and Minnesota state senator, stated it clearly in April 2020: thirteen thousand dollars for a COVID admission. Thirty-nine thousand dollars if the patient went on a ventilator. Three times as much.
The federal government also created a separate Provider Relief Fund, ultimately totaling $186.5 billion, distributed to hospitals in proportion to their prior Medicare business. A Kaiser Health News analysis found that hospitals in states barely touched by the pandemic received the equivalent of approximately $300,000 per reported COVID case. The Foundation for Economic Education wrote, in April 2020, that the economic incentive to add COVID-19 to diagnostic lists and death certificates was clear and did not require any conspiracy.
Hospitals that didn’t use their COVID relief funds according to federal terms were required to return them, with interest. The government reserved the right to pursue collection.
Hospitals were also paid a separate bonus for administering remdesivir, an antiviral drug costing $3,200 per treatment course that the World Health Organization reviewed and recommended against, finding no survival benefit. The FDA’s own prescribing information mandates liver monitoring because the drug is known to cause hepatotoxicity. Studies raised documented concerns about kidney injury, particularly in elderly and vulnerable patients, precisely the population filling those hospital beds.
Every positive test meant money. Every admission meant more. Every ventilator meant more still. And anyone who asked whether the coding was accurate, whether the protocols were appropriate, whether a dying person might have benefited from something other than what the reimbursement structure incentivized, that person was asking questions that the Event 201 recommendation had already classified as a problem to be managed.
Now notice what disappeared.
In the 2019-2020 flu season, according to the CDC’s own published data, approximately 38 million Americans were sickened by influenza. Twenty-two thousand died.
In the 2020-2021 flu season, 700 Americans died of influenza. Of 931,726 flu tests reported to the CDC, 0.2 percent were positive. In prior flu seasons the peak positive rate ran between 26 and 30 percent. One child died of influenza in the United States that year. In prior years the range was roughly 40 to 200 children.
The CDC attributed the disappearance to masking and social distancing.
Perhaps. But the same masking and distancing did not prevent hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths, according to the official count. And the official count was generated by the same diagnostic and coding infrastructure that paid thirteen thousand dollars for a positive admission and thirty-nine thousand for a ventilator.
I will ask you to simply draw your own conclusions. The numbers are the CDC’s.
And here is the question I won’t stop asking: was it coronavirus — or was it a really tough flu season? I don’t have enough proof to share an answer. I know what the incentive structure paid for. I know what virus vanished from the diagnostic record the moment COVID arrived. And I know that the people best positioned to answer that question were the same people writing the reports to say the nursing home deaths weren’t their fault.
Reflecting back to my hug with my friend Anna, the way we stood there in the wreckage of whatever we had just released and I felt, underneath the relief, something harder settling into place inside me.
We had been played.
Not manipulated in any ordinary sense. Not misled by a bureaucratic mistake or a model that turned out to be wrong or a well-intentioned policy that failed in execution. Played. Deliberately. By people who had gathered in a luxury hotel in Manhattan on a Friday morning in October 2019 and spent three and a half hours designing exactly this — the fear, the silence, the compliance, the suppression of every question that might have interrupted the sequence.
While we were isolated in our homes, performing our compliance, the nursing homes were filling. With untested, COVID-positive patients, sent by order, into buildings full of people who could not leave, whose families had been told to stay away for safety, who died in rooms where the window was the last border between them and everyone they loved.
The ships sat empty in the harbors.
The money moved.
The flu disappeared.
And I am asking for the truth. Because some people never got to ask.
Sources
1. New York State Department of Health Advisory, March 25, 2020: “Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing Homes”
2. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, September 2024: Internal Cuomo Administration Documents (Empire Center for Public Policy coverage)
3. New York Attorney General Letitia James, Report on Nursing Home Deaths, January 2021
4. ProPublica, “Fire Through Dry Grass,” July 2020
5. House Select Subcommittee Hearing, “Like Fire Through Dry Grass,” October 2023
6. Department of Justice Press Release, August 26, 2020: Data Requests to Governors of NY, NJ, PA, MI
7. USNI News: USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy patient counts, May 2020
8. Washington Examiner, April 3, 2020: “It’s a joke” — Michael Dowling, Northwell Health
9. CARES Act, Section 3710: 20% Medicare add-on for COVID-19 patients
10. Kaiser Health News analysis of Provider Relief Fund distribution
11. Dr. Scott Jensen, Minnesota State Senator, Fox News interview, April 8, 2020
12. Foundation for Economic Education, April 2020: COVID-19 diagnostic coding incentives
13. HHS Provider Relief Fund: Total $186.5 billion distributed; HRSA repayment terms
14. WHO review of remdesivir: No survival benefit finding
15. FDA prescribing information for remdesivir: hepatotoxicity monitoring requirement
16. CDC FluView data, 2019-2020 season: 38 million cases, 22,000 deaths
17. CDC FluView data, 2020-2021 season: 700 deaths, 0.2% positive test rate
18. CDC MMWR, September 2020: “Decreased Influenza Activity During the COVID-19 Pandemic”
19. Fox News, February 2021: Fauci praises New York response: “They did it correctly”
20. WITF/PA Post, June 2020: Pennsylvania nursing home directive, March 18, 2020