28 October 2020: U.S. DOJ Responds to Cuomo Stonewall by Ramping Up Investigation

Justice Department ramps up inquiry into NY care home deaths

This report describes the DOJ's expanded effort to get the nursing home coronavirus data it requested, which the Cuomo administration has been stonewalling on providing.

The U.S. Justice Department vastly expanded an inquiry Wednesday that could determine whether New York is undercounting coronavirus deaths among nursing home residents, demanding detailed data from hundreds of private facilities.

The demand ratchets up pressure on Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo after months of bipartisan criticism that the state’s official tally of 6,722 dead at long-term care facilities is probably off by thousands. That’s because New York, unlike nearly every other state, counts only residents who died on a nursing home’s property and not those who died after being taken to a hospital.

Cuomo’s administration has repeatedly refused to release such nursing home data to lawmakers and the media, including a public-records request from The Associated Press dating back to May.

This step indicates how seriously this matter is being taken by the DOJ, which will now dedicate more resources to its investigation. In refusing to cooperate with the DOJ's request for information within a reasonable period of time, the Cuomo administration has all but ensured this action, as the DOJ will no longer rely upon administration officials to obtain the information its independent investigators seek.

25 October 2020: Cuomo Benefited from "Quid pro Cuomo" Ads by NY Hospital Industry

Hospitals gave Gov. Andrew Cuomo a campaign booster shot: Devine

Miranda Devine's opinion column reviews OpenTheBooks' audit of campaign contributions to Governor Cuomo, in which the nonpartisan fiscal watchdog describes a pay-to-play relationship between contributors and the Governor. Devine focuses on the 'in-kind' support provided by the Greater New York Hospital Association.

When the pandemic hit in March, the association successfully lobbied the Cuomo administration to transfer COVID-positive patients to nursing homes to relieve pressure on hospitals.

Despite warnings from doctors that the move represented “a clear and present danger” to other nursing home residents, Cuomo issued his directive March 25, while federally provided beds in the Javits Center and USNS Comfort hospital ship mainly lay empty.

As we now know, the directive was a death sentence for an estimated 15,000 nursing home residents.

With the move proving to be a legal and public-relations nightmare, the association again struck gold when it lobbied for a budget provision limiting the ability of COVID-19 victims to file malpractice suits against hospitals and nursing homes.

Well satisfied with its investment in the governor, the association then spent millions on TV advertising that praised Cuomo’s management of the pandemic.

You could call the ads a quid pro Cuomo.

23 October 2020: Cuomo's Pandemic Leadership Book Silent on Number of COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Coronavirus Book: How Many Nursing Home Residents Died in New York

ProPublica's analysis delivers some pretty brutal observations:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s latest book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic,” went on sale this month. Its publisher has hailed the governor’s courageous honesty.

“Real leadership, he shows, requires clear communication, compassion for others, and a commitment to truth-telling — no matter how frightening the facts may be,” one bit of advertising for the book reads.

Here’s one hard truth Cuomo has still yet to tell: how many New York nursing home residents have died of COVID-19.

Nine months into the pandemic, and three months after his health commissioner testified that he was hard at work counting nursing home deaths, Cuomo has not announced the grim total.

The article indicates the Cuomo administration transferred some 6,400 COVID-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes in New York without testing to confirm whether or not they might still be contagious. It is quite possible a similar number of nursing home patients who became infected by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus introduced by these patients were moved in the opposite direction to hospitals where they died.

We think that avoiding political accountability and legal liability for those deaths is the most plausible explanation for Governor Cuomo's screaming silence on that subject in his book.

18 October 2020: Why a Nonpartisan Think Tank Sued Team Cuomo for NY Nursing Home Death Data

Churchill: The continuing quest for truth about NY's nursing home deaths

Another Chris Churchill column, which includes a discussion with Bill Hammond, the director of health policy for the Empire Center for Public Policy. The Center filed a lawsuit in the past week seeking public data records New York's health department has collected on COVID-19 illnesses and deaths among patients who resided in New York nursing homes in 2020 and has been refusing to provide to all those filing freedom of information requests for it:

Notably, the lawsuit does not even mention the controversial March 25 state order directing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients. And when I talked with Bill Hammond, the Empire Center's director of health policy, he said too much has been made of the mandate by some critics of the governor. He was being very fair.

Hammond also said he initially didn't think the state's flawed nursing home count mattered all that much. That changed when he saw Cuomo and other officials using the partial count to suggest, in response to criticism of the mandate, that New York had done better at protecting nursing home residents from COVID-19 than other states.

"That drove me up a tree," Hammond told me. "They said it over and over again fully knowing it wasn't true."

Then Hammond watched in dismay as the Department of Health used the undercount in a joke of a report (my words, not Hammond's) that claimed the March 25 order was not a factor in nursing home fatalities. The report was not only bad science, but troubling evidence of the health department being used to shine the governor's star.

According to New York's official count, 6,600 nursing home residents died of COVID-19. Hammond, after analyzing death and nursing home occupancy rates, puts the actual toll at 10,000 and up — equal to at least 10 percent of the state's nursing home population.

"That is a public health catastrophe," Hammond said. "It demands our absolute attention, so we understand how we could have prevented it and what we can do to prevent it next time."

Hammond's estimate of total coronavirus nursing home deaths is consistent with the lower end of the range we've seen in the past several months.

18 October 2020: A Casket Full of Cuomo's Pandemic Leadership Books

Casket outside Brooklyn nursing home filled with 6,500 covers of Cuomo’s book

The 6,500 book covers represent the state's official count of COVID nursing home deaths, which most honest observers indicate is several thousand short of the full toll.

The protestors also faulted Governor Cuomo for stonewalling an independent investigation of his administration's coronavirus nursing home policies:

But Brooklyn protest organizer Peter Arbeeny griped at the rally — where about a dozen people added photos of their lost loved ones to the casket — that Cuomo “hasn’t given us an independent investigation [into the alleged nursing-home debacle] so we can get to the truth.

“The families in front of you deserve to know the truth,” said Arbeeny, whose 89-year-old Korean War veteran father, Norman, was among the at least 56 people to die from COVID-19 at the Brooklyn facility.

18 October 2020: Brooklyn Protests for Cuomo Nursing Home Deaths

Protesters Rally in Brooklyn, Blame Cuomo for Thousands of Nursing Home COVID-19 Deaths

This article features the following observation from one of the protestors:

"Any pandemic plan, which we spent a billion dollars on here in New York, would say 'protect the most vulnerable population,' first thing you do. Here's the most vulnerable population—nursing homes, like Cobble Hill Health Center. And we didn't do that. In fact, we did just the opposite,” said one demonstrator.

17 October 2020: Cuomo "We're No. 46" in Nursing Home Deaths Claim Rated "Mostly False"

Cuomo's claim on nursing home deaths not whole story

PolitiFact rates Governor Cuomo's 30 September 2020 claim that "we're No. 46 out of 50 states... we're 46th in terms of percentage of deaths in nursing homes" as "Mostly False". In giving the claim such a positive assessment, PolitiFact is showing its political bias in weirdly giving credit to the Governor for citing statistics that reference the state's official figures, which is really strange because those figures are widely viewed as greatly understating the COVID death toll among those who resided at New York's nursing homes in 2020. PolitiFact also ignores the Governor's role in stonewalling bipartisan calls for both independent investigations and the release of deceased nursing home patient data.

The "Mostly False" rating by PolitiFact really says quite a lot about its political bias. As independent analysts, we would rate the claim somewhere between "Entirely False" and "Pinochio's Nose Just Extended to the Moon and His Pants Are on Fire". Eventually, a fuller accounting of COVID-19 deaths among New York nursing home residents will come out and we'll find out who is better at honestly evaluating these claims.

16 October 2020: Opinion - Cuomo's Pandemic Leadership Book Undermined by Critical Omissions

Churchill: Failings of Cuomo's new book outweigh its charms

Times Union columnist Chris Churchill gives his take on Governor Cuomo's untimely coronavirus book release, finding the governor's book isn't telling anything close to the truth of what happened in the state. Here's a short sample of the review:

In the book, Cuomo cites a discredited state report blaming employees for introducing the virus to nursing homes. He suggests nursing homes didn't actually take in COVID patients, though his own health department says more than 6,300 were transferred to them.

Worse, he uses a bogus number to falsely claim, once again, that New York ranks low in the percentage of overall deaths tied to nursing homes.

As many of you know, the state's official nursing home tally of more than 6,600 fatalities is a significant undercount that excludes residents who ultimately died in hospitals. Other states don't count nursing home deaths that way, and, despite numerous requests and even a lawsuit, Cuomo has refused to release the honest number.

And you won't find it in his book.

14 October 2020: Cuomo Pandemic "Leadership" Book Short on Addressing Mistakes

Cuomo's book on NY pandemic outbreak short on state missteps

This AP report finds Governor Andrew Cuomo's book "American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic" is short on new information, especially regarding mistakes made by his administration.

13 October 2020: Governor Cuomo Denies Panic in Issuing Deadly Directive

Today show interview between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Willie Geist - This interview is significant in that after denying the existence of his administration's 25 March 2020 directive to force nursing homes to blindly accept COVID patients without testing to determine if they were still contagious, which we archived here before New York's Department of Health later scrubbed it from their web server on 26 May 2020, he is now also denying the reason why he signed off on the policy:

"Would my Health Department have followed the federal guidance? Obviously not, knowing the political issue it was going to create. But there was no issue in reality is what I'm saying... because we never did have a scarcity of beds. We always had additional hospital beds and emergency beds, so no nursing home was forced to take someone. We never got there."

Here's a link to that portion of the video of the interview.

Based on his contemporary statements and actions in March 2020, April 2020, and May 2020, we think it is clear he did not believe that was true at the time. If he and other officials in his administration had really believed there was no issue with a scarcity of beds at the time, the https://cuomo-nursing-homes-timeline.blogspot.com/2020/03/25-march-2020.html would never have been issued.

13 October 2020: Cuomo Blames NY Post and GOP for NY Nursing Home Deaths Controversy

Cuomo blames GOP, NY Post for controversy over nursing home COVID-19 deaths

Governor Cuomo has written a book, which is hitting bookstores this month, in which he claims his political opposition and the newspaper that broke the story for the nursing home deaths that occurred while his 25 March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to admit patients known to carry coronavirus infections without any testing to verify if they were still contagious was in effect are the ones responsible for the ensuing scandal. That would be the ongoing scandal for which his administration is stonewalling both bipartisan calls for independent investigations and for a full accounting of coronavirus-related deaths among the state's nursing home residents.

This report is also significant because it sets an upper estimate of 13,000 on the total number of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents in New York, based on the number of unfilled beds those facilities have today. Governor Cuomo and his administration have only officially acknowledged approximately 6,700 deaths at this time.

3 October 2020: Editorial: Cuomo Engaged in Nursing Home "Deception"

Andrew Cuomo's latest nursing home deception

The New York Post's editorial board weighed in here on the Governor's latest public relations tactic of making false claims and attempting to rewrite history to hide the role of Governor Cuomo's policies in contributing to coronavirus deaths among New York's nursing home residents.

2 October 2020: Opinion - Governor Cuomo's "Memory-Hole"

Andrew Cuomo is shamelessly trying to memory-hole his coronavirus nursing home fiasco

This opinion column homes in on a possible motive for Governor Cuomo's latest claim: "It's no surprise that Cuomo continues to dismiss concerns over the nursing home fiasco. He's got a reputation to protect." It also notes that he has a book coming out in less than two weeks, where the continuing scandal of the governor's nursing home scandal will contradict his claims of effectively leadership.

2 October 2020: Cuomo News Media Cheerleader Finds Cuomo Claim False

Facts First: Gov. Cuomo falsely claims New York nursing homes 'never needed' to take in Covid-positive patients

News network CNN, which employs Governor Cuomo's brother in a prominent prime-time editorial role and which has frequently provided Governor Cuomo with a "safe space" to advance his agenda, responded to the Governor's latest claim with a fact check, finding his claims to be false.

2 October 2020: Governor Cuomo Claims "It Never Happened"

'It never happened': Cuomo denies causing 6,500 nursing home deaths

This report describes Governor Andrew Cuomo's latest tactic to try to distance himself from his administration's disastrous coronavirus nursing home policies: bald-faced denial.