- Cuomo's claim on nursing home deaths not whole story
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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.
