3 August 2020: Hearings Into Cuomo Nursing Home Policies Begin in NY Legislature

Cuomo official grilled on coronavirus nursing home deaths, secrecy

This report describes the first day of scheduled hearings on how Governor Cuomo and his administration's policies affected the spread coronavirus infections at nursing homes throughout the state of New York. The testimony of state health commissioner Howard Zucker confirms the role that coronavirus models had in shaping the administration's policies and directives affecting the state's nursing homes, but continued evading quantifying the full scope of deaths that resulted from coronavirus infections under those policies:

State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker defended the administration’s response Monday and said officials were worried about projections from global and federal public health experts that New York could have faced a surge of over 100,000 COVID-19 patients at once. He defended his agency’s recent report, which has been panned by academics, claiming that the original March 25 directive was not a “significant factor” in virus outbreaks.

But as the number of infections have plunged and plateaued in recent weeks in New York, lawmakers grew frustrated Monday as Zucker declined to provide key data points sought by Democrats and Republicans, including a rough estimate of how many nursing home residents have died in hospitals of COVID-19.

“I will not provide information that I have not ensured is absolutely accurate,” Zucker said. “This is too big an issue and it’s too serious an issue.”...

But lawmakers said the lack of transparency makes it hard to protect nursing homes during the crisis. They questioned why states like California are providing the kind of data sought by lawmakers and the public.

“It seems that what y’all are doing is just trying to minimize,” said Sen. Gustavo Rivera, Democrat and chair of the Committee on Health.

The lack of transparency from the Cuomo administration official, including identifying which state officials authored the state's controversial 25 March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to admit infected coronavirus patients, will likely remain an issue.