31 March 2020: Forecasting the Cresting Wave

New York governor says brother, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, has coronavirus

While this article is primarily about Governor Cuomo's brother, journalist Chris Cuomo, the host of CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time" weekday evening broadcast, it also confirms the coronavirus epidemic forecast models Governor Cuomo was using in making his decisions were pointing to the peak of infections still being ahead:

Cuomo said various predictive models being used by New York indicate the apex of the surge for hospitals will come anywhere from 7 to 21 days from now.

“The virus is more powerful, more dangerous than we expected,” Cuomo said. “We’re still going up the mountain. The main battle is on top of the mountain.”

30 March 2020: Hospital Ship Arrives in New York City

USNS Comfort arrives in New York City

The U.S. Navy's Comfort hospital ship arrived in New York City, just as its status as the national epicenter of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic was established.

The ship, emblazoned with red crosses on its white hull, will not treat coronavirus patients, but will take on other patients including trauma cases, freeing up beds at local hospitals focused on combating the pandemic. It will have 750 beds ready to treat patients immediately.

The Comfort is staffed by 1,200 medical personnel and equipped with operating rooms, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy, digital radiology, a CAT scan, two oxygen-producing plants and a helicopter deck.

“We needed this boost. We needed this hope,” de Blasio said, calling it a “beacon of hope” to see the ship entering city waters and “coming here to save the lives of New Yorkers in our hour of need.”

Like the 2,500 bed Javits Center temporary field hospital, only a small fraction of its available capacity was used before Governor Cuomo acknowledged the ship would no longer be needed on 21 April 2020.

29 March 2020: Governor Cuomo Acknowledges "Toxic Mix"

Cuomo says virus and nursing homes a ‘toxic mix’; 8,519 cases in Westchester

This is one of the earliest reports confirming that Governor Cuomo and his administration's public health officials were very well aware of the risk of their policy from a very early date. Note that this report came just 9 days after Governor Cuomo ordered New Yorkers to stay-at-home and business closures statewide. Also note that he was fighting President Trump's proposed quarantine of New York City and the surrounding counties (including in New Jersey and Connecticut) that have seen the highest rates of coronavirus-related infections and deaths in the U.S.

Here's a key quote from the article confirming Governor Cuomo knew what the consequences of placing contagious coronavirus patients in nursing homes were:

“This virus preys on the vulnerable. It preys on seniors. It preys on people with compromised immune systems and underlying illnesses. And coronavirus in a nursing home can be like fire in dry grass,” Cuomo said.

And so it was. It's not like this information wasn't known by the state of New York's top officials responsible for managing the state's epidemic response. They knowingly chose to do it anyway.

27 March 2020: Temporary Field Hospital Opens in New York City

Inside the 1,000-bed temporary hospital at the Javits Center

New York City's Javits Center was converted into a temporary field hospital facility, with the first 1,000 beds becoming available on 27 March 2020, and another 1,500 beds planned to become available on 1 April 2020.

Nearly two months later, the facility was shut down, having only used a tiny fraction of its available capacity during New York's first wave of coronavirus infections during the pandemic. Had the facility been used to accommodate the COVID-19 patients discharged from New York hospitals to free up their bed space, much of the additional infections that took place among the residents of New York's nursing homes and assisted living facilties may have been avoided.

26 March 2020: Anticipation of Deadly Results from a Deadly Directive

New York Mandates Nursing Homes Take Covid-19 Patients Discharged From Hospitals

The pushback from nursing homes fearing harm to their resident patients from the Cuomo administration's 25 March 2020 directive was immediate, as this article confirms. Here's a short excerpt:

A group representing doctors who work in nursing homes, known as AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, said in a recent resolution that “admitting patients with suspected or documented Covid-19 infection represents a clear and present danger to all of the residents of a nursing home.”

“We’ve got an extraordinarily vulnerable population on our hands,” said Christopher Laxton, executive director of the group. Nursing homes’ older, often frail residents are particularly susceptible to the virus. Many nursing homes have also long struggled with infection control, according to federal inspection records and researchers.

The deadly risks of the Cuomo administration's COVID-19 nursing home policy were well known at the time the directive was implemented.

FLASHBACK, March 2020: Caller To "Mark Levin Show" Explains Cuomo's "Unbelievable" Nursing Home COVID Policy

We weren't aware of this news item until 12 March 2021, but we're inserting it into the timeline where it belongs, since it captures the contemporary reaction of a nursing home employee who understood what the Cuomo administration was forcing upon New York's elderly, sick, and highly vulnerable nursing home residents.

Here's the 'flashback' of the excerpt from the 26 March 2020 edition of the Mark Levin radio broadcast:

Medical director called into @marklevinshow desperate to get the word out about Cuomo putting COVID+ patients in nursing homes.

She called * the day after * Cuomo made his nursing home order on March 25th 2020: pic.twitter.com/ooLi7NSYXS

— Sara (@SaraThatcherCA) March 11, 2021

Here's a partial transcription of the broadcast:

During a March 2020 edition of the Mark Levin Show, a caller who says she is a medical director at a nursing home tried to get the word out about New York's policy with respect to COVID patients being placed in nursing homes.

"Are you pulling my leg, seriously?" host Mark Levin asked, sounding amazed. "Why would you send someone who has this virus into a population that can kill people. Are you serious? Why would he order this? It doesn't make any sense."

"I will point out that nursing homes are in the habit of accepting [patients] from hospitals to continue their care," the caller said.

"But they must realize the most vulnerable people here are the elderly, and people in nursing homes already have issues?" Mark Levin wondered. "What is the point of this?"

"I'm looking at a [directive] from Andrew Cuomo [and Howard Zucker] dated March 25 that is ordering nursing homes to comply with the [expedited] receipt of resident from hospitals, if they are deemed appropriate to go into the nursing homes by the hospitals and they can not discriminate on the [presence] of COVID," the caller explained.

There is absolutely no question that everyone in a position to know better knew the 25 March 2020 directive would be bad news for New York's nursing home residents from the very beginning. That includes hundreds, if not thousands, of people employed by the state government of New York who would be charged with ensuring the directive was enforced, who transported COVID patients from hospitals to nursing homes, who were doctors, nurses, and other health care workers and administrators who discharged COVID patients to nursing homes, and those in the media who chose not to pursue the story as it was breaking because it didn't fit the politically biased narrative they wanted to push at the time.

25 March 2020: A Deadly Directive Is Issued

New York Department of Health: Advisory: Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing Homes

The Cuomo administration's panic prompted it to have the New York Department of Health issue what would become an infamous directive on 25 March 2020. The directive mandated that nursing homes must admit patients released from hospitals where they had been treated for coronavirus infections into their facilities, where refusals could mean the loss of their New York state-issued licenses to operate. Here's an image of the directive's text:

The New York Department of Health would later scrub this document from its web site.

24 March 2020: Panic Sets In

Andrew Cuomo: Apex of coronavirus outbreak in NY two or three weeks away

This report is the first to show the level of panic that was building within the New York Governor's office:

Cuomo, speaking at his daily COVD-19 briefing in Manhattan, said the state's projection models now suggest the apex of the coronavirus crisis could hit New York within 14 to 21 days, rather than the 45 days the state projected late last week.

He likened it to a "bullet train" headed for New York, urging the federal government to deploy as many ventilators and as much protective medical gear it can to the state as quickly as possible.

"Where are they?" Cuomo said. "Where are the ventilators? Where are the masks? Where are the gowns? Where are they?”

At this point, we should show what one of the more influential coronavirus models that Governor Cuomo was using looked like, which Political Calculations originally presented on 12 May 2020. The following chart is taken from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)'s 25 March 2020 projections showing its estimates of the minimum, likely, and maximum number of additional hospital beds that would be needed in the state of New York to care for the model's expected surge of coronavirus patients.

This is just one of several coronavirus models whose projections were being combined and presented to Governor Cuomo by consultants from McKinsey & Co., where the IHME's coronavirus model's projections for New York are consistent with the figures and timing of a peak cited by Governor Cuomo in the days preceding his panic.

Faced with what appeared to be an imminent shortage of hospital beds and other medical resources, the Cuomo administration appears to have adopted an emergency triage strategy, one that would have devastatingly deadly consequences. Here, to free up as many beds as possible in New York's near-capacity hospitals, the Cuomo administration would try to move as many patients infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as they could out of these facilities into others, even though they could still be contagious and present the risk of spreading infections within the facilities to which they would be transferred.

The facilities in which they would choose to place them were predominantly privately run nursing homes.

Note: This analysis was originally presented at Political Calculations on 12 May 2020.

21 March 2020: Directive to Stop COVID-19 Testing at Nursing Homes Is Issued

Health Advisory: Respiratory Illness in Nursing Homes and Adult Care Facilities in Areas of Sustained Community Transmission of COVID-19

New York's Department of Health issued new guidance for nursing homes to address patients suspected of having coronavirus infections in the counties hardest hit by COVID-19, instructing them that "testing of residents and HCWs with suspect COVID-19 is no longer necessary". It went on to tell them they should not delay any additional infection control actions, with the guidance that patients with respiratory infection symptoms would be presumed to have COVID-19.

Nursing homes following this guidance would effectively turn off the screening of incoming patients for active COVID-19 infections to their facilities in the following weeks.

19 March 2020: Cuomo's Literary Agent Takes Call from Publisher Seeking Book by Cuomo About Pandemic Leadership, Work Begins Shortly Afterward

This timeline entry was retroactively added on 22 November 2021, based on the findings of the New York State Assembly's impeachment probe report.

Impeachment Investigation Report to Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Lavine and the New York State Assembly Judiciary Committee

The following excerpt confirms the very early origins of Andrew M. Cuomo's pandemic "leadership" book deal.

As early as March 19, 2020, a Penguin Random House (“PRH”) employee reached out to a literary agent representing then-Governor Cuomo to see if the then-Governor was interested in writing a book.

Work on Cuomo's book project began shortly afterword, utilizing state government employees and resources, including members of the state's pandemic task force.

17 March 2020: The Coronavirus Models' Projections

Governor Cuomo Announces Three-Way Agreement with Legislature on Paid Sick Leave Bill to Provide Immediate Assistance for New Yorkers Impacted By COVID-19

Governor Cuomo expanded on his previous day's realization of hospital beds becoming a scarce resource after an overnight surge in the number of reported cases.

"There is a curve, everyone's talked about the curve, everyone's talked about the height and the speed of the curve and flattening the curve. I've said that curve is going to turn into a wave and the wave is going to crash on the hospital system.

I've said that from day one because that's what the numbers would dictate and this is about numbers and this is about facts. This is not about prophecies or science fiction movies. We have months and moths of data as to how this virus operates. You can go back to China. That's now five, six months of experience. So just project from what you know. You don't have to guess.

We have 53,000 hospital beds in the State of New York. We have 3,000 ICU beds. Right now the hospitalization rate is running between 15 and 19 percent from our sample of the tests we take. We have 19.5 million people in the State of New York. We have spent much time with many experts projecting what the virus could actually do, going back, getting the China numbers, the South Korea numbers, the Italy numbers, looking at our rate of spread because we're trying to determine what is the apex of that curve, what is the consequence so we can match it to the capacity of the health care system. Match it to the capacity of the health care system. That is the entire exercise.

The, quote on quote, experts, and by the way there are no phenomenal experts in this area. They're all using the same data that the virus has shown over the past few months in other countries, but there are extrapolating from that data.

The expected peak is around 45 days. That can be plus or minus depending on what we do. They are expecting as many as 55,000 to 110,000 hospital beds will be needed at that point. That my friends is the problem that we have been talking about since we began this exercise. You take the 55,000 to 110,000 hospital beds and compare it to a capacity of 53,000 beds and you understand the challenge."

Faced with the potential shortage of needing 110,000 beds and only having 53,000 to provide care to coronavirus patients in New York, Governor Cuomo lobbied President Trump for support, which resulted in President Trump ordering the U.S. Navy's hospital ship USNS Comfort to sail to New York City the next day, and also lobbied for the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers to begin identifying public facilities in New York City to be converted for use as temporary hospitals to handle the projected overflow of coronavirus patients from regular hospitals.

USNS Comfort would later arrive in New York City on 30 March 2020, and the Army Corps of Engineers would have 1,000 beds ready at New York City's Javits Center ready on 27 March 2020, and were working to expand it to a 2,500 bed temporary hospital facility by 1 April 2020. But during the time in between, the updated projections of the coronavirus models would lead Governor Cuomo to panic.

16 March 2020: How Many Hospital Beds Will Be Needed?

Governor Cuomo is a Guest on CNN's Cuomo Prime Time

At this point, Governor Cuomo was beginning to appreciate that the thousands of hospital beds across the state of New York were really a scarce resource.

"I see a wave and the wave is going to break on the health care system ... You take any numerical projections on any of the models and our health care system has no capacity to deal with it."...

"Yeah. I think you look at that trajectory, just go dot, dot, dot, dot, connect the dots with a pencil. You look at that arc, we're up to about 900 cases in New York. It's doubling on a weekly basis. You draw that arc, you understand we only have 53,000 hospital beds total, 3,000 ICU beds, we go over the top very soon."

This transcript also marks what would become one of the most shameful and corrupt episodes in modern journalism, as CNN became complicit in the scandals that followed.

12 March 2020: Families Locked Out of New York Nursing Homes

During Novel Coronavirus Briefing, Governor Cuomo Announces New Mass Gatherings Regulations

At the time Governor Cuomo's office released this transcript, New York City had nearly reached the numbers that Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted just three days earlier and was set to blast through it. The faster than previously projected growth in the number of COVID-19 infections drove a change in public policy, as Governor Cuomo banned all public events with more than 500 people in attendance and required gatherings with fewer than 500 people to cut capacity by 50%.

Cuomo ends visitation at nursing homes to fight coronavirus

Governor Cuomo expanded his actions to protect nursing home patients to cover the entire state of New York. Note his statement:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday suspended all visits to nursing homes as the spread of the coronavirus worsens statewide.

“This means no visitors in a nursing home,” Cuomo said. “If you care for someone in a nursing home, the last thing you want to do is endanger them.”...

“That is the most vulnerable population,” Cuomo said earlier this week. “It is the most dangerous situation faced by the virus … that’s my nightmare. You are going to see pain and damage from this in nursing homes.”

Indeed, that risk was also communicated in the official directive New York's Department of Health issued to nursing homes the next day. And the very last thing you would want to do is purposefully introduce the coronavirus infection into a nursing home. And yet, less than two weeks later....

9 March 2020: Coronavirus Epidemic Well in Hand in NY with No Reported Deaths

Coronavirus Cases in New York State Rise to 105

This article describes the numbers of coronavirus infections that were being reported soon after New York's state of emergency had been declared. Here's an excerpt:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday that the city had 13 confirmed cases, including a new case of a man in the Bronx. Based on modeling, his team estimated there could be 100 cases in the next two or three weeks, but for most people, the illness would result in very mild symptoms.

At this point, no deaths related to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infections had been reported.

7 March 2020: New York Declares State of Emergency

Cuomo declares state of emergency in New York as state coronavirus cases soar to 89

This article outlines one of the earliest actions Governor Cuomo took in addressing New York's coronavirus epidemic. In the following excerpt, he clearly knew that nursing home patients were uniquely at risk from coronavirus infections and was taking action to reduce their risks of exposure:

Nursing homes and senior living facilities in the New Rochelle area will be asked to suspend outside visitors, he said.

“Nursing homes are the most problematic setting for us,” given that the virus is most deadly for elderly and medically compromised patients, Cuomo said.

This article confirms Governor Cuomo has known the risks of coronavirus infection to nursing home patients from the very beginning of the coronavirus epidemic in the state of New York.