July 31, 2024 Records Request to NYC Health + Hospitals for Time-series Intubation & Drug Data

Post subject to updates

This is a post to document the status of a records request I recently submitted to NYC Health + Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the agency that operates New York City’s eleven public hospitals and five nursing homes.

From: Jessica Hockett
Subject: FOIL request Date: July 31, 2024
To: HHCFOIL <hhcfoil@nychhc.org>

Good day.

Pursuant to FOIL, please provide the following records:

1) Daily census of all hospital patients intubated in the ICU from 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2022.
2) Daily or weekly medication inventory for paralytics and sedative agents (propofol, ketamine, versed, fentanyl, phenobarbital, pentobarbital, etomidate, aldol) from 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2022
3) Daily or weekly doses of all antibiotics administered to all patients from 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2022

Excel spreadsheet format preferred.

Regards,

Jessica Hockett

I received acknowledgment today:

From: HHCFOIL <HHCFOIL@nychhc.org> Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] FOIL request
Date: August 7, 2024
To: Jessica Hockett
Cc: HHCFOIL <HHCFOIL@nychhc.org>

Dear Requester:

This acknowledges NYC Health + Hospitals' receipt of your request under the Freedom of Information Law.

Please be advised that we are processing your request, and to the extent that any records exist and are appropriate for disclosure under FOIL, we will disclose them to you.

We will contact you within approximately twenty business days to inform you of the results of our records search and analysis, and of any reproduction fees in connection with your requested record.

Sincerely,

Carmen Genao
Deputy Records Access Officer
NYC Health + Hospitals

I’ll update this post when I receive another response.

My success with obtaining records from HHC has been mixed.

After a long wait and contradictory messages from staff, the agency gave me bed occupancy data for “epicenter of the epicenter” Elmhurst Hospital that conflicts with media and government narratives about the facility experiencing high patient volumes.

The agency refused to provide all requested data when I asked for deaths occurring daily in hospitals between 1 Jan 2017 and 31 December 2020, supplying numbers for 2020 only.

This latest request is another step in my ongoing attempts to confirm or disconfirm various hypotheses (my own and others’) about what created such a cataclysmic loss of life in New York City in spring 2020 and whether the all-cause death curve is manipulated.