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.