17 June 2020: No One in Cuomo Administration Willing to Admit Who Wrote, Approved Deadly Directive

Cuomo silent on who approved coronavirus nursing home policy

This report demonstrates both a lack of candor and transparency on the part of Governor Cuomo concerning how he and his administration came to adopt its deadly coronavirus nursing home policy and follows up ProPublica's "Fire Through Dry Grass" article from 16 June 2020, which describes the motive of Governor Cuomo and New York's public health officials had, which we'll emphasize here:

And a Columbia University expert, Dr. Charles Branas, told ProPublica that the March 25 directive may have increased the state’s COVID-19 death toll by an as-yet-unknown order of magnitude and cited an Associated Press estimate on the number of coronavirus patients who were admitted to nursing homes as a result of the order.

“If you introduce 4,500 people sick with a potentially lethal disease into a vulnerable and notoriously imperfectly monitored population, people are apt to die,” said Branas, chairman of the Epidemiology Department at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Branas also said the since-abandoned policy “looks like it was intended as a ‘reverse triage’ strategy to clear acute and critical care hospital beds, regardless of whether those beds had people with COVID-19 or not.”

Branas' assessment of the Cuomo administration's motives aligns with our previous analysis, where we described the policy they adopted for the purpose of transferring coronavirus-infected patients from hospitals to nursing homes to avoid overwhelming the hospitals' capacity as an "emergency triage strategy", but Branas' "reverse triage" terminology better and more precisely describes the strategy.