23 June 2020: Governor Cuomo Blames Nursing Home Staffs for Nursing Home Deaths

Gov. Cuomo blames sick nursing home staffers for infecting residents

This article reports on Governor Cuomo's latest attempt to avoid responsibility for his administration's deadly policies of both forcing New York nursing homes to admit patients without testing to verify if they might be active carriers for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and to allow nursing home staff members known to have been infected to continue working (see the entries for 29 April 2020 above), where they might spread the deadly infection among vulnerable residents. He's also doubled down again on the first policy:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday blamed sick nursing home staffers for infecting residents at the facilities — and doubled down on a controversial state order barring the facilities from turning away coronavirus-positive patients, saying, “It wasn’t a mistake.”

“No, it wasn’t a mistake because … you didn’t want to leave a senior citizen in the hospital for two weeks if you didn’t need to be in a hospital bed for two weeks,” Cuomo said on MSNBC of his Health Department’s widely scrutinized March 25 mandate, which may have fueled more than 6,000 confirmed and presumed COVID-19 deaths in New York.

The governor added, “By the time a person was transferred after nine or 10 days, they were no longer contagious and what all the data says is, the reason you had infections in nursing homes were because the staff brought in the infection.”

“You look at the communities that had the high infection rate overall — those were the communities that had a high infection rate — so it is that the staff got infected. They came to work and they brought in the infection.”

Previous reports have indicated that if a nursing home had a week's supply of personal protective equipment (or PPE) for staff members, meaning masks and gloves, state health officials considered that sufficient to protect both residents and staff members from the potential for infection (see entries for 26 April 2020 and 5 May 2020).

Meanwhile, nursing home staff members are the latest target in Governor Cuomo's political campaign to distract from his administration's leading role in spreading coronavirus infections in New York's nursing homes, where he has previously targeted the CDC, the FDA, the federal government, national and international health experts, nursing home operators, President Trump, Florida, and also the New York Post for blame in the state's nursing home deaths.